Abstract
This paper deals with the interpretation and distribution of universal Free Choice (FC) items, such as English FC any or Spanish cualquiera. Crosslinguistically, universal FC items can be characterized as follows. First, they have a restricted distribution. Second, they express freedom of choice: the sentence You can take any card conveys the information that the addressee is free to pick whichever card she chooses. Under standard assumptions, the truth conditions of sentences like You can take any card are taken to be captured by formalizations in which a universal quantifier ranging over individuals has wide scope over the possibility modal. The crucial observation that informs the account in this paper is that this type of formalization cannot capture the freedom of choice component. I will argue that in order to derive the right interaction between possibility modals and FC items, we need to add an exclusiveness condition to the standard wide scope paraphrases. The same proposal that guarantees freedom of choice will automatically account for the distribution restrictions of FC items. The formal implementation of this proposal is cast in the Hamblin semantics proposed in Kratzer and Shimoyama (Indeterminate phrases: The view from Japanese, 2002).
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Acknowledgments
This article reports some of the results of my dissertation (Menéndez-Benito 2005). I would like to thank my committee members, Angelika Kratzer, Lyn Frazier, Rajesh Bhatt, and Jonathan Schaffer for their invaluable help. Special thanks to my advisor, Angelika Kratzer, for innumerable conversations, much excellent advice, and constant encouragement throughout the dissertation year and beyond. Thanks also to Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Jan Anderssen, Ana Arregui, Sandy Chung, Donka Farkas, Danny Fox, Barbara Partee, Chris Potts, Kyle Rawlins, Florian Schwarz, and Anne-Michelle Tessier for very helpful discussions. I am also very grateful to two anonymous NALS reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the final version of this paper. For challenging questions and useful suggestions, I would like to thank the students in my 2005 Free Choice seminar at UC Santa Cruz, as well as audiences at UMass Amherst, UC Santa Cruz, the 2005 LSA Summer Institute, Sinn und Bedeutung 10, NELS 36, UC San Diego, the University of Maryland, MIT, the University of Rochester, and Stanford University. I would also like to thank Christine Bartels for her editorial help. Of course, all errors are my own.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Menéndez-Benito, P. On universal Free Choice items. Nat Lang Semantics 18, 33–64 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-009-9050-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-009-9050-x