In this paper, the meanings of sentences containing the word or and a modal verb are used to arrive at a novel account of the meaning of or coordinations. It is proposed that or coordinations denote sets whose members are the denotations of the disjuncts; and that the truth conditions of sentences containing or coordinations require the existence of some set made available by the semantic environment which can be ‘divided up’ in accordance with the disjuncts. The relevant notion of (...) ‘dividing things up’ is made explicit in the paper. Detailed attention is given to the question of how the proposed truth conditions are derived from the syntactic input. The account offered allows for the derivation of both the disjunctive and the nondisjunctive readings of modal/or sentences, including the much-discussed free choice readings of may/or sentences. (shrink)

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). (shrink)

W. Labov's & T. Labov's findings concerning their child grammar acquisition ("Learning the Syntax of Questions" in Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language, Campbell, R. & Smith, P. Eds, New York: Plenum Press, 1978) are interpreted in terms of different semantics of why & other wh-questions. Z. Dubiel.

This paper investigates a generalized version of inquisitive semantics. A complete axiomatization of the associated logic is established, the connection with intuitionistic logic and several intermediate logics is explored, and the generalized version of inquisitive semantics is argued to have certain advantages over the system that was originally proposed by Groenendijk (2009) and Mascarenhas (2009).

Crosslinguistically, questions frequently make crucial use of morphosyntactic elements which also occur outside of questions. Chief among these are focus, disjunctions, and wh-words with indefinite semantics. This paper provides a compositional account of the semantics of wh-, alternative, and polar questions in Yucatec Maya (YM), which are composed primarily of these elements. Key to the account is a theory of disjunctions and indefinites (extending work by others) which recognizes the inherently inquisitive nature of these elements. While disjunctions and indefinites are (...) inquisitive, they differ from questions since they are also truth-conditionally informative. Compositionally, then, the role of focus in YM questions is to presuppose the informative component of an indefinite wh-word or disjunction, rendering the inquisitive component the question’s only new contribution to the discourse. In addition to deriving question denotations compositionally, the account also captures a potentially surprising fact: focused disjunctions in YM can function as either questions or assertions, depending solely on the discourse context. (shrink)

The exclusive component of unembedded disjunctions is standardly derived as a conversational implicature by assuming that or forms a lexical scale with and. It is well known, however, that this assumption does not suffice to determine the required scalar competitors of disjunctions with more than two atomic disjuncts (McCawley, Everything that linguists have always wanted to know about logic* (But were ashamed to ask). Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1993, p. 324; Simons, “Or”: Issues in the semantics and pragmatics of disjunction. (...) Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1998). To solve this, Sauerland (Linguist Philos 27(3): 367–391, 2004) assumes that or forms a lexical scale with two otherwise unattested silent connectives ( ${\mathbb{L}}$ and ${\mathbb{R}}$ ) that retrieve the left and right terms of a disjunction. A number of recent works have proposed an Alternative Semantics for indefinites and disjunction to account for their interaction with modals and other propositional operators (Kratzer and Shimoyama, In: Otsu Y (ed) The Proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics. Hituzi Syobo, Tokyo, pp. 1–25, 2002; Aloni, In: Weisgerber M (ed) Proceedings of the Conference “SuB7—Sinn und Bedeutung”. Arbeitspapier Nr. 114. Konstanz, pp. 28–37, 2003; Simons, Nat Lang Semantics 13: 271–316, 2005; Alonso-Ovalle, Disjunction in alternative semantics. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 2006). We note that the McCawley–Simons problem does not arise in an Alternative Semantics, if we assume that the set of pragmatic competitors to a disjunction is the closure under intersection of the set of propositions that it denotes. An adaptation of the strengthening mechanism presented in Fox (In: Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics. MacMillan, Palgrave, pp. 71–120, 2007) allows for the derivation of the exclusive component of disjunctions with more than two atomic disjuncts without having to rely on the ${\mathbb{L}}$ and ${\mathbb{R}}$ operators. The proposal extends to the case of disjunctions with logically dependent disjuncts. (shrink)

The article proposes an analysis of imperatives and possibility and necessity statements that (i) explains their differences with respect to the licensing of free choice any and (ii) accounts for the related phenomena of free choice disjunction in imperatives, permissions, and statements. Any and or are analyzed as operators introducing sets of alternative propositions. Free choice licensing operators are treated as quantifiers over these sets. In this way their interpretation can be sensitive to the alternatives any and or introduce in (...) their scope. (shrink)

The natural interpretation of counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents involves selecting from each of the disjuncts the worlds that come closest to the world of evaluation. It has been long noticed that capturing this interpretation poses a problem for a minimal change semantics for counterfactuals, because selecting the closest worlds from each disjunct requires accessing the denotation of the disjuncts from the denotation of the disjunctive antecedent, which the standard boolean analysis of or does not allow (Creary and Hill, Philosophy of (...) Science 43:341–344, 1975; Nute, Journal of Philosophy 72:773–778, 1975; Fine, Mind 84(335):451–458, 1975; Ellis et al. Journal of Philosophical Logic 6:335–357, 1977). This paper argues that the failure to capture the natural interpretation of disjunctive counterfactuals provides no reason to abandon a minimal change semantics. It shows that the natural interpretation of disjunctive counterfactuals is expected once we refine our assumptions about the semantics of or and the logical form of conditionals, and (i) we assume that disjunctions introduce propositional alternatives in the semantic derivation, in line with independently motivated proposals about the semantics of or (Aloni, 2003a; Simons, Natural Language Semantics 13:271–316, 2005; Alonso-Ovalle, Disjunction in Alternative Semantics. PhD thesis, 2006); and (ii) we treat conditionals as correlative constructions, as advocated in von Fintel (1994), Izvorski (Proceedings of NELS 26, 1996), Bhatt and Pancheva (2006), and Schlenker (2004). (shrink)

Provability, Computability and Reflection.

This paper concerns what might be called the variably bad behavior of the word or. As is well known, there are a variety of environments in which the word or misbehaves – misbehaves, in the sense that it gives rise to interpretations which are not expected given the standard analysis of this word as, roughly, set union. One of these environments is the scope of a modal. This case has received a lot of attention recently in the literature, and a (...) number of researchers, including myself, have proposed accounts of or which explain its behavior in this environment. (shrink)