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  1. Free Choice Impossibility Results.Simon Goldstein - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (2):249-282.
    Free Choice is the principle that possibly p or q implies and is implied by possibly p and possibly q. A variety of recent attempts to validate Free Choice rely on a nonclassical semantics for disjunction, where the meaning of p or q is not a set of possible worlds. This paper begins with a battery of impossibility results, showing that some kind of nonclassical semantics for disjunction is required in order to validate Free Choice. The paper then provides a (...)
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  • Cognitive processing of scalar implicatures with Chinese gradable adjectives.Si Liu & Yi Yang - 2017 - Pragmatics and Cognition 24 (3):373-403.
    In previous research comparing the Context-driven Model with the Default Model of meaning processing, the former was preferred. It predicts that contexts play an exclusively decisive role in meaning processing, whereas the latter holds that the inference of literal meaning generally goes through, unless it is subsequently defaulted or cancelled by the context it is associated with. The Standardization Model, which we added to our experiments, highlights that implicatures are figured out from standardized forms typically based on the mutual background (...)
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  • Expressing Permission.William B. Starr - 2016 - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 26:325-349.
    This paper proposes a semantics for free choice permission that explains both the non-classical behavior of modals and disjunction in sentences used to grant permission, and their classical behavior under negation. It also explains why permissions can expire when new information comes in and why free choice arises even when modals scope under disjunction. On the proposed approach, deontic modals update preference orderings, and connectives operate on these updates rather than propositions. The success of this approach stems from its capacity (...)
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  • Free choice permission and the counterfactuals of pragmatics.Melissa Fusco - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (4):275-290.
    This paper addresses a little puzzle with a surprisingly long pedigree and a surprisingly large wake: the puzzle of Free Choice Permission. I begin by presenting a popular sketch of a pragmatic solution to the puzzle, due to Kratzer and Shimoyama, which has received a good deal of discussion, endorsement and elaboration in recent work :535–590, 2006; Fox, in: Sauerland and Stateva Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, 2007; Geurts, Mind Lang 24:51–79, 2009; von Fintel, Central APA session on Deontic (...)
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  • Independent alternatives: Ross’s puzzle and free choice.Richard Jefferson Booth - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (4):1241-1273.
    Orthodox semantics for natural language modals give rise to two puzzles for their interactions with disjunction: Ross’s puzzle and the puzzle of free choice permission. It is widely assumed that each puzzle can be explained in terms of the licensing of ‘Diversity’ inferences: from the truth of a possibility or necessity modal with an embedded disjunction, hearers infer that each disjunct is compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I argue that Diversity inferences are too weak to explain the full (...)
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  • An Implicature account of Homogeneity and Non-maximality.Moshe E. Bar-Lev - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (5):1045-1097.
    I provide arguments in favor of an implicature approach to Homogeneity where the basic meaning of the kids laughed is some of the kids laughed, and its strengthened meaning is all of the kids laughed. The arguments come from asymmetries between positive and negatives sentences containing definite plurals with respect to children’s behavior, the availability of Non-maximal readings, and the robustness of neither-true-nor-false judgments :205–248, 2015). I propose to avoid some problems of Magri’s analysis by modeling the Implicature account of (...)
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  • The Free Choice Permission as a Default Rule.Daniela Glavaničová - 2018 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 25 (4):495-516.
    It is quite plausible to say that you may read or write implies that you may read and you may write (though possibly not both at once). This so-called free choice principle is well-known in deontic logic. Sadly, despite being so intuitive and seemingly innocent, this principle causes a lot of worries. The paper briefly but critically examines leading accounts of free choice permission present in the literature. Subsequently, the paper suggests to accept the free choice principle, but only as (...)
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  • Discourse, Diversity, and Free Choice.Wolfgang Schwarz - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (1):48-67.
    ABSTRACT ‘You may have beer or wine’ suggests that you may have beer and you may have wine. Following Klinedinst, I argue that this ‘free choice’ effect is a special kind of scalar implicature, arising from the application of an unspecific predicate to a plurality (of worlds). I show that the implicature can be derived from general norms of cooperative communication, without postulating new grammatical rules or hidden lexical items. The derivation calls for an extension to the classical neo-Gricean model. (...)
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  • The counterfactual direct argument.Simon Goldstein - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (2):193-232.
    Many have accepted that ordinary counterfactuals and might counterfactuals are duals. In this paper, I show that this thesis leads to paradoxical results when combined with a few different unorthodox yet increasingly popular theses, including the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Given Duality and several other theses, we can quickly infer the validity of another paradoxical principle, ‘The Counterfactual Direct Argument’, which says that ‘A> ’ entails ‘A> ’. First, I provide a collapse theorem for the ‘counterfactual direct argument’. (...)
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  • On children’s variable success with scalar inferences: Insights from disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier.Elena Pagliarini, Cory Bill, Jacopo Romoli, Lyn Tieu & Stephen Crain - 2018 - Cognition 178 (C):178-192.
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  • Simplifying with Free Choice.Malte Willer - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):379-392.
    This paper offers a unified semantic explanation of two observations that prove to be problematic for classical analyses of modals, conditionals, and disjunctions: the fact that disjunctions scoping under possibility modals give rise to the free choice effect and the fact that counterfactuals license simplification of disjunctive antecedents. It shows that the data are well explained by a dynamic semantic analysis of modals and conditionals that uses ideas from the inquisitive semantic tradition in its treatment of disjunction. The analysis explains (...)
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  • Testing theories of plural meanings.Lyn Tieu, Cory Bill, Jacopo Romoli & Stephen Crain - 2020 - Cognition 205 (C):104307.
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  • Context, Content, and the Occasional Costs of Implicature Computation.Raj Singh - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10:456058.
    The computation of scalar implicatures is sometimes costly relative to basic meanings. Among the costly computations are those that involve strengthening `some' to `not all' and strengthening inclusive disjunction to exclusive disjunction. The opposite is true for some other cases of strengthening, where the strengthened meaning is less costly than its corresponding basic meaning. These include conjunctive strengthenings of disjunctive sentences (e.g., free-choice inferences) and exactly-readings of numerals. Assuming that these are indeed all instances of strengthening via implicature/exhaustification, the puzzle (...)
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  • Free choice, simplification, and Innocent Inclusion.Moshe E. Bar-Lev & Danny Fox - 2020 - Natural Language Semantics 28 (3):175-223.
    We propose a modification of the exhaustivity operator from Fox Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 71–120, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210752_4) that on top of negating all the Innocently Excludable alternatives affirms all the ‘Innocently Includable’ ones. The main result of supplementing the notion of Innocent Exclusion with that of Innocent Inclusion is that it allows the exhaustivity operator to identify cells in the partition induced by the set of alternatives whenever possible. We argue for this property of (...)
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  • Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts.Nicole Gotzner, Jacopo Romoli & Paolo Santorio - 2020 - Natural Language Semantics 28 (2):141-174.
    Disjunctions in the scope of possibility modals give rise to a conjunctive inference, generally referred to as ‘free choice.’ For example, Emma can take Spanish or Calculus suggests that Emma can take Spanish and can take Calculus. This inference is not valid on standard semantics for modals in combination with a Boolean semantics for disjunction. Hence free choice has sparked a whole industry of theories in philosophy of language and semantics. This paper investigates free choice in sentences involving a non-monotonic (...)
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  • Processing Conversational Implicatures: Alternatives and Counterfactual Reasoning.Bob van Tiel & Walter Schaeken - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S5):1119-1154.
    In a series of experiments, Bott and Noveck (2004) found that the computation of scalar inferences, a variety of conversational implicature, caused a delay in response times. In order to determine what aspect of the inferential process that underlies scalar inferences caused this delay, we extended their paradigm to three other kinds of inferences: free choice inferences, conditional perfection, and exhaustivity in “it”‐clefts. In contrast to scalar inferences, the computation of these three kinds of inferences facilitated response times. Following a (...)
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  • Children interpret disjunction as conjunction: Consequences for theories of implicature and child development.Raj Singh, Ken Wexler, Andrea Astle-Rahim, Deepthi Kamawar & Danny Fox - 2016 - Natural Language Semantics 24 (4):305-352.
    We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...)
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  • Modified numerals and maximality.Brian Buccola & Benjamin Spector - 2016 - Linguistics and Philosophy 39 (3):151-199.
    In this article, we describe and attempt to solve a puzzle arising from the interpretation of modified numerals like less than five and between two and five. The puzzle is this: such modified numerals seem to mean different things depending on whether they combine with distributive or non-distributive predicates. When they combine with distributive predicates, they intuitively impose a kind of upper bound, whereas when they combine with non-distributive predicates, they do not. We propose and explore in detail four solutions (...)
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  • Complex Inferential Processes Are Needed for Implicature Comprehension, but Not for Implicature Production.Irene Mognon, Simone A. Sprenger, Sanne J. M. Kuijper & Petra Hendriks - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 11.
    Upon hearing “Some of Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome,” adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to “Some but not all Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome.” Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least 5 years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children’s production of scalar expressions like some and all suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life. (...)
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  • The Understanding of Scalar Implicatures in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Dichotomized Responses to Violations of Informativeness.Walter Schaeken, Marie Van Haeren & Valentina Bambini - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:348157.
    This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like “Some elephants have trunks” by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term ‘some’ can be interpreted pragmatically, ‘Not all elephants have trunks’, or logically, ‘Some and possibly all elephants have trunks’. Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, (...)
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  • The role of alternative salience in the derivation of scalar implicatures.Alice Rees & Lewis Bott - 2018 - Cognition 176 (C):1-14.
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  • Overlapping Mechanisms in Implying and Inferring.Alice Rees & Lewis Bott - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (1).
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  • Two methods to find truth-value gaps and their application to the projection problem of homogeneity.Manuel Križ & Emmanuel Chemla - 2015 - Natural Language Semantics 23 (3):205-248.
    Presupposition, vagueness, and oddness can lead to some sentences failing to have a clear truth value. The homogeneity property of plural predication with definite descriptions may also create truth-value gaps: The books are written in Dutch is true if all relevant books are in Dutch, false if none of them are, and neither true nor false if, say, half of the books are written in Dutch. We study the projection property of homogeneity by deploying methods of general interest to identify (...)
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  • Priming methods in semantics and pragmatics.Mora Maldonado, Benjamin Spector & Emmanuel Chemla - 2017 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40.
    Structural priming is a powerful method to inform linguistic theories. We argue that this method extends nicely beyond syntax to theories of meaning. Priming, however, should still be seen as only one of the tools available for linguistic data collection. Specifically, because priming can occur at different, potentially conflicting levels, it cannot detect every aspect of linguistic representations.
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  • The role of focus intonation in implicature computation: a comparison with only and also.Nicole Gotzner - 2019 - Natural Language Semantics 27 (3):189-226.
    The function of focus is to activate alternatives, and these activated alternatives are used to compute the corresponding inferences of an utterance. The experimental research reported here investigates the role of focus intonation in inference computation and its interplay with the overt focus particles only and also. In particular, I compare the mechanisms underlying the computation of exhaustivity implicatures, assertions, and additive presuppositions. A memory delay experiment revealed that contrastive intonation makes an exhaustive interpretation equally available as overt only. A (...)
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  • When some triggers a scalar inference out of the blue. An electrophysiological study of a Stroop-like conflict elicited by single words.Cécile Barbet & Guillaume Thierry - 2018 - Cognition 177 (C):58-68.
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