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Free choice, modals, and imperatives

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Abstract

The article proposes an analysis of imperatives and possibility and necessity statements that (i) explains their differences with respect to the licensing of free choice any and (ii) accounts for the related phenomena of free choice disjunction in imperatives, permissions, and statements. Any and or are analyzed as operators introducing sets of alternative propositions. Free choice licensing operators are treated as quantifiers over these sets. In this way their interpretation can be sensitive to the alternatives any and or introduce in their scope.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 15, 1012 CP, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Maria Aloni

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  1. Maria Aloni
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Correspondence to Maria Aloni.

Additional information

Part of this material has been presented at the conference Sinn und Bedeutung 7 in 2002 (Aloni 2003a) and the Fourteenth Amsterdam Colloquium in 2003 (Aloni 2003b). Special thanks to Katrin Schulz, Paul Dekker, Balder ten Cate and Alastair Butler for their insightful comments on previous versions of this article. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for detailed written comments. The research reported here was financially supported Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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Aloni, M. Free choice, modals, and imperatives. Nat Lang Semantics 15, 65–94 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-007-9010-2

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