Free Choice Items and Alternatives
Maria Daria Aloni, Robert van Rooij · 2005
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 indifference ’ 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 difference between existential and universal FCs is due only to the choice of these alternatives. 1