On the relation between distributivity and maximality

2023-12-18T03:09:52-08:00

This short contribution addresses the question of whether distributivity and maximality are tied together in natural language quantification – and thus, more generally, the issue of which semantic properties are obligatorily correlated. It is well-known that quantifiers like English all require maximality but permit non-distributivity, but does the inverse case exist as well, i.e., are there distributive quantifiers that permit non-maximality? We argue that for some speakers, the German distance-distributive element jeweils does not require maximality, and contrasts in this respect with the DP-internal distributive quantifier jed- (‘every’,‘each’) and its distance-distributive counterpart.

EARLY ACCESS

Free choice with anaphora

2023-10-10T10:02:43-07:00

In this paper, we formulate a new problem for any account of Free Choice (FC) inferences, which we dub FC with anaphora. According to the classical FC inference schema, given a sentence of the form ♢(φ ∨ ψ), one can infer ♢φ and ♢ψ. FC with anaphora involves cases where an anaphoric dependency spans φ ∨ ψ. Anaphora is heavily constrained in disjunctions, but a negative existential statement in the initial disjunct can license a pronoun in the latter disjunct — so called bathroom disjunctions, e.g., “Either there’s no bathroom in this house, or it’s in a funny place”. We show that embedding a bathroom disjunction under an existential modal gives rise to a FC inference that doesn’t follow from the classical schema — since the schema is stated in terms of the individual disjuncts, any information about anaphoric dependencies between disjuncts is lost. In order to capture FC with anaphora, we develop a semantic account based on Goldstein 2019, couched in the framework of Bilateral Update Semantics. We also discuss alternative ways of accounting for FC with anaphora, within an exhaustification framework, as well as introducing several related problems involving anaphora and inferences which we characterize as involving simplification more generally.

EARLY ACCESS

Semantics and Pragmatics

On the relation between distributivity and maximality

Free choice with anaphora