Free choice, modals, and imperatives

Authors
Publication date 2007
Journal Natural Language Semantics
Volume | Issue number 15 | 1
Pages (from-to) 65-94
Number of pages 29
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
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.
Document type Article
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-007-9010-2
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