Size Matters: The Syntax of Disjunctive Questions

In languages like English, disjunctive questions have an alternative (ALT) reading and a yes/no (YN) reading. The two readings behave differently; there are environments in which one reading disappears and the other one survives. In this article, examining novel Croatian data, I investigate the environments where the YN reading disappears. Such environments suggest that the two readings of disjunctive questions differ in the size of the disjuncts: ALT readings arise when the disjoint constituents are bigger than the _TP, while YN readings arise from disjunctions of phrases as big as the surface string suggests and not bigger than the _TP.