Indefinites and free choice:When the past matters

Indefinites display a great functional variety and they give rise to different pragmatic effects. We focus on free choice indefinites and in particular on the Italian qualsiasi. Our aim is to reconstruct the grammaticalization path of this item and understand how diachronic data might shed some light on existing semantic theories of free choice. We employ corpus-based tools to build a database containing occurrences of qualsiasi from its origin and early forms to its current usage. We show that qualsiasi emerged from a particular unconditional construction and we outline the different stages which led to its grammaticalization. We analyze the compatibility of our diachronic study with formal accounts of free choice inferences, with a focus on Alternative Semantics analyses for indefinite pronouns and so-called grammatical theories of free choice. Our work shows that an integration between formal semantics and historical linguistics is fruitful and worth pursuing

You may like or dislike this paper, and we do care which:Sluicing and free choice

In this paper we study how different FC inferences are derived in cases of sluiced sentences that differ just by the verb embedding the sluice, improving on Fusco (2019). We propose to add a new economy condition to Rudin (2019) that is able to derive – together with other existing constraints – the desired sluices from certain syntactico-semantic properties (temporal orientation; Condoravdi 2001) of embedding verbs. We then present an analysis in which the attested FC inferences are derived from the different sluices through the interplay of scopal parallelism (Chung et al. 1995; Fusco 2019) and uniqueness presupposition of singular which clauses (Dayal 1996)

Interpreting concealed questions

Concealed questions are determiner phrases that are naturally paraphrased as embedded questions (e.g., John knows the capital of Italy ≈ John knows what the capital of Italy is). This paper offers a novel account of the interpretation of concealed questions, which assumes that an entity-denoting expression α may be type-shifted into an expression ?z.P(α), where P is a contextually determined property, and z ranges over a contextually determined domain of individual concepts. Different resolutions of P and the domain of z yield a wide range of concealed question interpretations, some of which were not noted previously. On the other hand, principled constraints on the resolution process prevent overgeneration