• Corpus ID: 14103975

Free Choice Items and Alternatives

@inproceedings{Aloni2005FreeCI,
  title={Free Choice Items and Alternatives},
  author={Maria Aloni and Robert van Rooy},
  year={2005}
}

• M. Aloni, Robert van Rooy
• Published 2005
• Philosophy

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 indierence’ 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 dierence between existential and universal FCs is due only to the choice of these alternatives.