What's a distinct or alternative?

•Distinctness between or alternatives is mostly determined by the explicature.•The decision whether to rescue semantically nondistinct alternatives is pragmatic.•The nature of the rescue is pragmatic (context-dependent).•Distinctness is not uniform. Equivalence or constructions only manifest distinct forms.

The alternatives introduced by or constructions are typically distinct from each other. Hurford's (1974) constraint dictates that disjuncts must not entail each other, which defines Distinctness as mutual nonentailment. In agreement with Simons (2001), I first argue that this constraint is too strong and too semantic, but relying on the Relevance-theoretic concept of contextual adjustment (Carston, 2002), I call for a more radical pragmatic shift. I include a discussion of Equivalence or constructions, where the alternatives are not referentially distinct, arguing that again, it is pragmatic considerations that determine whether to impose Distinctness or not. The take-home message is that pragmatics governs the variable application of the Distinctness constraint.