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Generically Free Choice

This paper discusses free-choice like effects in generics. Just as Jane may drink coffee or tea can be used to convey Jane may drink coffee and Jane may drink tea (she is “free to choose”), some generics with disjunctive predicates can be used to convey conjunctions of simpler generics: elephants live in Africa or Asia can be used to convey elephants live in Africa and elephants live in Asia. I...

Free Choice for Simplification

The fact that counterfactuals in general license simplification of disjunctive antecedents is a familiar problem for the traditional Lewis-Stalnaker variably strict analysis of counterfactuals. This paper demonstrates that the data are well explained by a dynamic strict analysis of counterfactuals that uses ideas from the inquisitive semantic tradition to provide a satisfying semantic explanati...

Free Choice Counterfactual Donkeys

We propose a straightforward analysis of counterfactual donkey sentences, by combining the Lewis/Stalnaker analysis of counterfactuals with standard dynamic semantics. The main idea is to define a similarity relation between world-assignment pairs such that two such pairs are unconnected if their assignments differ. We show that with the help of this ordering relation we can also account for a ...

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Generically Free Choice

This paper discusses free-choice like effects in generics. Just as Jane may drink coffee or tea can be used to convey Jane may drink coffee and Jane may drink tea (she is “free to choose”), some generics with disjunctive predicates can be used to convey conjunctions of simpler generics: elephants live in Africa or Asia can be used to convey elephants live in Africa and elephants live in Asia. I...