https://semprag.org/index.php/sp <p>Semantics and Pragmatics, founded in 2007 and first published in 2008, is a Diamond Open Access journal published by the Linguistic Society of America.</p> Linguistic Society of America en-US Semantics and Pragmatics 1937-8912 <p>Articles appearing in Semantics and Pragmatics are published under an author agreement with the <a href="https://www.linguisticsociety.org/">Linguistic Society of America</a> and are made available to readers under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution License</a>.</p> https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.18.1 <p>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 <em>all</em> 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 <em>jeweils</em> does not require maximality, and contrasts in this respect with the DP-internal distributive quantifier <em>jed-</em> (‘every’,‘each’) and its distance-distributive counterpart.</p> <p>EARLY ACCESS</p> Nina Haslinger Eva Rosina Viola Schmitt Valerie Wurm Copyright (c) 2025 Nina Haslinger, Emil Eva Rosina, Viola Schmitt, Valerie Wurm http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 2025-01-06 2025-01-06 18 1:EA 1:EA 10.3765/sp.18.1 https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.18.2 <p>In this paper, we formulate a new problem for any account of Free Choice (FC) inferences, which we dub <em>FC</em> 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 <em>bathroom disjunctions</em>, 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 <em>between</em> disjuncts is lost. In order to capture FC with anaphora, we develop a semantic account based on Goldstein 2019, couched in the framework of <em>Bilateral Update Semantics</em>. 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 <em>simplification</em> more generally.</p> <p>EARLY ACCESS</p> Patrick David Elliott Yasu Sudo Copyright (c) 2025 Patrick David Elliott, Yasu Sudo http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 2025-01-21 2025-01-21 18 2:EA 2:EA 10.3765/sp.18.2