國小科學文本「或」的邏輯語義分析

An Analysis of the Logical Semantic Meanings of ‘or’ in Elementary Science Texts

本文旨在藉由瞭解漢語中「或」字意義的演變，探討小學科學文本中「或」的使用情形及其語義的釋讀，進而分析「或」的多元語義的可能起因，並討論與「或」有關之科學教與學的策略，提出進一步研討的議題。在研究設計方面，以「或」的五種邏輯語義為架構，針對小學科學教科書科學文本進行質性分析。研究結果指出，小學科學文本中的「或」至少有五種語義：兼容」、「排斥」、「等同」、「所有」以及「兼有」等。此外，有些「或」的敘述甚至允許多重語義：有些「或」既可被詮釋為「兼容」義，也可被理解為「排斥」義；有些則可能兼具「兼有」與「排斥」的意義，其中，兼有「或」體現了「與」的意義。本文特別探討「或」和「與」的混用的可能原因，並對後續研究以及教與學提出建議。

The Chinese character ‘或’ (Romanized as ‘huo’; English meaning ‘or’) can beused in many ways, including as a noun, verb, pronoun, and logical connective.As it functions as a logical connective, at least five different semantic meanings(inclusive-, exclusive-, identical-, whole-, and both-or) have been distinguished.This paper explores the deployment and meaning variations of ‘huo’ in elementaryscience texts. The findings indicate that the five types of ‘huo’ are prevailinglydeployed in elementary science text. Crucially, the texts consistently lacklinguistic cues for teachers and readers to understand the exact meaning. Understandingthe meaning of ‘huo’ depends a great deal on domain knowledge.Strategies for teaching logical connectives and topics for further investigationsare proposed.