Speaker: Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (MIT) & Vincent Rouillard (MIT)
Title: Tying Free Choice in Questions to Distributivity
Time: Wednesday, October 30th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:Disjunctive answers to universally modalized wh-interrogatives have been noted to lead to free choice inferences.
(1) Q: Which books are we required to read?
A: The French books or the Russian books.
Implies: You are allowed to read the French books and you are allowed to read the Russian books.
The presence of such inferences has lead many to propose that wh-items can quantify over generalized quantifiers (Spector 2007,2008; a.o.). However, this move does not capture the lack of such inference when the restrictor of the wh-item is singular.
(1) Q: Which book are we required to read?
A: The French book or the Russian book.
Does not imply: You are allowed to read the French book and you are allowed to read the Russian book.
We propose to account for this contrast by capturing the free choice inference using a covert existential distributivity operator (Bar-Lev 2017). We show that this moves derives many restrictions that the generalized quantifier theory must stipulate.