Free choice with anaphora
Patrick D. Elliott, Yasutada Sudo
January 2025
 

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 new semantic account couched in the framework of Bilateral Update Semantics. We also introduce several related problems involving anaphora and inferences which we characterize as involving simplification more generally.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007608
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Semantics and Pragmatics https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.18.2
keywords: free choice, anaphora, dynamic semantics, update semantics, disjunction, semantics
previous versions: v1 [September 2023]
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