Disjoined noun phrases may introduce disjunctive discourse referents. This
is perhaps unsurprising, as disjunction can be seen as indefinite
quantification over a domain of two individuals. Disjunction provides more
flexibility in some respects than indefinites, though, as the two disjuncts
may bear different morphological features, and a disjunctive discourse
referent may have a split antecedent.
Sign language has been shown to bear on arguments pertaining to discourse
anaphora. Notably, discourse referents may be established at locations in
the signing space (loci), closely paralleling the use of variables in
dynamic semantics. This relation has been shown to be mediated by a
“featural” layer, behaving similarly to phi-features like gender. Here, we
compare several theories of disjunctive anaphora and of space in sign
language with new data from French Sign Language (LSF).