France or Spain or Germany or France: A Neural Account of Non-Redundant Redundant Disjunctions

arXiv:2602.23547v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sentences like “She will go to France or Spain, or perhaps to Germany or France.” appear formally redundant, yet become acceptable in contexts such as “Mary will go to a philosophy program in France or Spain, or a mathematics program in Germany or France.” While this phenomenon has typically been analyzed using symbolic formal representations, we aim to provide a complementary account grounded in artificial neural mechanisms. We first present new behavioral evidence from humans and large language models demonstrating the robustness of this apparent non-redundancy across contexts. We then show that, in language models, redundancy avoidance arises from two interacting mechanisms: models learn to bind contextually relevant information to repeated lexical items, and Transformer induction heads selectively attend to these context-licensed representations. We argue that this neural explanation sheds light on the mechanisms underlying context-sensitive semantic interpretation, and that it complements existing symbolic analyses.