Disjunctive clauses with o. o ‘either. or’ in Spanish and clausal cosubordination

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines disjunctive clauses marked with o… o ‘either… or’ in Spanish with a view to demonstrating that, in contrast to conventional analyses, o… o-clauses are actually cosubordinate: o… o-clauses are [+dependent, ‒embedded], they generally share clausal operators and they often denote an episode or a sequence of events showing some sort of continuity in space as well as participants. To this end, this paper will describe subordinate and coordinate clauses in accordance with several tests and will go on to outline the properties of o… o-clauses, focusing in particular on their similarities and differences with respect to coordinate and subordinate clauses. Finally, it will describe why o… o-clauses would be better classified as examples of clausal cosubordination.