Variation in English Free Choice Items

There has been significant progress in our understanding of Free Choice any and of -ever free relatives in recent years. Very often, however, the investigation of these two Free Choice Items (FCI) in English has been conducted in parallel. One of the aims of this paper is to bring the two strands together in a way that can account for commonalities and differences between them and, perhaps, a third FCI some N or other whose semantics has not been studied as extensively. The second is to account for two problems in the analysis of FC any that have proved recalcitrant to theoretical explanation. I claim here that all FCI have a multi-dimensional meaning, sharing a primary truth conditional contribution with standard one-dimensional quantifiers like every, plain free relatives and some, but encoding on top of that, a requirement of indeterminacy. I characterize the indeterminacy of FC any as a grammatical constraint against the extension of the relevant property (the intersection of the nominal and the verbal properties) being the same in every accessible world. It is predicted to be unacceptable in precisely those cases where the primary meaning contradicts this requirement of fluctuation. This allows for a uniform account of two knotty problems, subtrigging and the partitive restriction. I also take note, in accounting for the behavior of any in negative statements, of supplemental any which has distinct properties from regular FC any. In contrast to the indeterminacy requirement of any, the indeterminacy requirement of -ever and some N or other is weak, merely implying lack of knowledge on the part of the speaker about the identity of individuals or lack of relevance of their identity. Such indeterminacy is compatible with fluctuation (as is the case with any) but is not dependent on it.