Expressing choices in natural language

The goal of the course is to enable students to conduct their own experimental or theoretical research on a widely debated and researched phenomenon in semantics and pragmatics: how we express choices in natural language. The phenomenon has to do with sentences like (1), where a disjunction appears in the scope of a possibility modal, and gives rise to a conjunctive inference, generally referred to as ‘Free choice.’ That is, (1) suggests that Angie can take Spanish and can take Calculus (and hence that she can ‘choose’ between the two). This inference is problematic, since it is not validated by a classical semantics for modals and disjunction. To complicate things further, free choice tends to disappear under negation: (2) doesn’t merely suggest that Angie can’t choose, but rather that she can take neither Spanish nor Calculus.

(1) Angie can take Spanish or Calculus. ⇝ Angie can choose between the two 

(2) Angie cannot take Spanish or Calculus. ⇝ Angie can take neither of the two 

Free choice has sparked an industry of theories in philosophy of language and formal semantics/pragmatics since the seventies. A theory of this pattern not only has to derive the contrast between positive and negative cases; it should also answer questions about these readings such as: are they part of the semantics of sentences like the above or do they arise as extra inferences? And what is the status of these readings? How do they interact with other aspects of meaning? There are two main approaches in the literature on how to derive free choice. We will outline the two approaches and their divergent predictions and explore how they fare against a range of experimental evidence in the literature from both adults and children. In addition, we will discuss the interaction between free choice and quantifiers, plurality, generics, and presuppositions.