Aloni and van Rooij on Free Choice

Maria Aloni & Robert van Rooij: “Free Choice Items and Alternatives”, to appear in Proceedings of KNAW Academy Colloquium: Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation, 2004.

Abstract: Extending the proposal made by Schulz (2003), we put forward a pragmatic account of the meaning of existential and universal FC items, where the ‘ignorance or indifference’ inference triggered by the former and the ‘universal’ inference triggered by the latter are treated as implicatures obtained by standard gricean reasoning formalized in terms of the two operations grice and competence. On this account, the implicatures of a sentence are generated with respect to a number of relevant alternatives. The difference between existential and universal FCs is due only to the choice of these alternatives.