Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2024 / The pragmatics of free choice <em>any</em>

The pragmatics of free choice <em>any</em>

Paper · 2024 · Anna Alsop

Summary

The paper asks why You may read any book so strongly suggests that each book could be read alone, without the others. Menéndez-Benito and Dayal built this into the semantics: Dayal's Viability Constraint makes it an entailment. Szabolcsi's bishop counterexample shows the constraint is too strong. Her weaker Revised Viability Constraint only requires that each item be allowed but not required, which leaves the strong reading unexplained. Alsop argues that the strong reading is a highly stable pragmatic inference, which she calls the exclusiveness implicature. To derive it, she combines Szabolcsi's semantics with a Rational Speech Act (RSA) model. The model builds on Champollion et al. (2019) and adds techniques from Franke & Bergen (2020), so that a listener can weigh several exhaustified parses of one sentence. Because the stronger parse excludes more worlds, the listener usually settles on it. When world knowledge or predicate meaning rules it out, the listener falls back on the weaker parse. The model also predicts that this implicature is less sensitive to context than other inferences from the same sentence. The work shows how grammatical exhaustification and probabilistic pragmatics can share the explanatory work.

Key points

  • The counterexample. Any bishop may meet a bishop is fine even though no bishop can be the only one meeting a bishop. Meeting is symmetric, so Dayal's constraint wrongly predicts the sentence is odd.
  • The grammatical framework. The account follows Chierchia (2013). FCI any is an underlying existential that a covert operator O obligatorily strengthens.
    • O comes in several types, targeting all, scalar, domain, or pre-exhaustified domain alternatives.
    • The two competing semantic readings correspond to two different exhaustified parses.
  • Robustness of the implicature. In the RSA model, the listener rejects the all-or-nothing state ("Only 2") after hearing a May Any utterance. This holds even when that state has a high prior.
    • Other implicatures from the same sentence shift easily with priors, because no literal parse supports them.
  • Model setup. The domain has only two items. The number of parses differs by utterance:
    • May Any has 2 parses.
    • May S and May P have 3 each.
    • May Every has 4.
  • Acknowledged limits.
    • The state space grows exponentially with domain size, and the dynamics change at size 3 or more.
    • The Revised Viability Constraint's meaning seems cancelable, as in the chores dialogue with the grandmother.
    • You may take any class is a possible counterexample to Magri's Mismatch Hypothesis.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When the strong and weak readings of a sentence are separate parses, a listener can prefer the one that excludes more worlds and drop back to the weaker one only when context contradicts it. This gives a principled default with an explicit failure path.
  • I2. Robustness is used as a diagnostic: an inference backed by some literal parse survives skewed priors, while one with no parse behind it moves with expectations.
  • I3. The paper treats symmetric predicates such as meet as a test that can block a reading outright.
  • I4. The prior over utterance–parse pairs is a design choice. Making all pairs equally likely differs from sampling the utterance first and then a parse, which favours utterances with fewer parses. The conclusions held under both options.
  • I5. Cancelability tests are used to separate obligatory meaning from defeasible meaning. An example is following you may with "in fact, you must do all of them" and checking whether this produces a contradiction.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): The implicature layer in prag could store each candidate exhaustified reading of a free-choice or scalar sentence. It would choose the strongest one that is consistent with the world model and log why any rejected reading failed.
  • I2 (frames): Each implicature in prag could be tagged as parse-backed or prior-driven, so that later steps treat prior-driven ones as soft and easy to retract.
  • I3 (world): Symmetry flags in the compiled verb-class knowledge could let the world step veto exclusivity readings like "X alone met someone" for such verbs.
  • I4 (learn): Evaluation could rerun disambiguation under both prior schemes as a sensitivity check, and accept a conclusion only if it holds under both.
  • I5 (answer): QA tests could include follow-ups that cancel an inference, to check that readers retract implicatures but keep entailments.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓New York UniversityNew York · United States201 works · 100,180 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPhilosophy · 284 works

Cite

Cite as Anna Alsop. 2024. The pragmatics of free choice <em>any</em>. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.9629

@article{alsop2024pragmatics,
  title = {{The pragmatics of free choice <em>any</em>}},
  author = {Anna Alsop},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.9629},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9629}
}

References

24 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Anvari, Amir. 2018. Logical Integrity. In Maspong, Sireemas & Stefánsdóttir, Brynhildur & Blake, Katherine & Davis, Forrest (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 28, 711–726. Cambridge, MA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v28i0.4419 ↗
  2. Carlson, Greg N. 1980. Polarity any is existential. Linguistic Inquiry 11(4). 799–804. find
  3. Champollion, Lucas & Alsop, Anna & Grosu, Ioana. 2019. Free choice disjunction as a rational speech act. In Blake, Katherine & Davis, Forrest & Lamp, Kaelyn & Rhyne, Joseph (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 29, 238–257. Los Angeles, CA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v29i0.4608 ↗
  4. Chierchia, Gennaro. 2006. Broaden your views: Implications of domain widening and the “logicality” of language. Linguistic Inquiry 37(4). 535–590. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/ ling.2006.37.4.535 ↗
  5. Chierchia, Gennaro. 2013. Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199697977.001.0001 ↗
  6. Cremers, Alexandre & Wilcox, Ethan G. & Spector, Benjamin. 2023. Exhaustivity and antiexhaustivity in the RSA framework: Testing the effect of prior beliefs. Cognitive Science 47(5). e13286. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13286 ↗
  7. Dayal, Veneeta. 2004. The universal force of free choice any. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 4. 5–40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/livy.4.02day ↗
  8. Dayal, Veneeta. 2009. Variation in English free choice items. Universals and Variation: Proceedings of GLOW in Asia VII, 237–256. find
  9. Dayal, Veneeta. 2013. A viability constraint on alternatives for free choice. In Fălăuş, Anamaria (ed.), Alternatives in semantics (Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition), 88–122. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317247 ↗
  10. Fox, Danny. 2007. Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures. In Sauerland, Uli & Stateva, Penka (eds.), Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, 71–120. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210752_4 ↗
  11. Frank, Michael C. & Goodman, Noah D. 2012. Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games. Science 336(6084). 998. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1218633 ↗
  12. Franke, Michael & Bergen, Leon. 2020. Theory-driven statistical modeling for semantics and pragmatics: A case study on grammatically generated implicature readings. Language 96(2). e77– e96. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2020.0034 ↗
  13. Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite pronouns (Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198235606.001.0001 ↗
  14. Horn, Laurence. 1969. A presuppositional analysis of only and even. In Proceedings from the annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 5, 98–107. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. find
  15. Horn, Laurence. 1972. On the semantics and pragmatics of logical operators in English. Los Angeles, CA: University of California dissertation. find
  16. Kadmon, Nirit & Landman, Fred. 1993. Any. Linguistics and Philosophy 16(4). 353–422. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00985272 ↗
  17. Ladusaw, William A. 1979. Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations. Austin, TX: University of Texas dissertation. find
  18. Magri, Giorgio. 2009. A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures. Natural Language Semantics 17(3). 245–297. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-009-9042-x ↗
  19. Menéndez-Benito, Paula. 2005. The grammar of choice. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts dissertation. find
  20. Menéndez-Benito, Paula. 2010. On universal Free Choice items. Natural Language Semantics 18(1). 33–64. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-009-9050-x ↗
  21. Roberts, Craige. 2012. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics and Pragmatics 5(6). 1–69. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.6 ↗
  22. Schreiber, Alexander & Onea, Edgar. 2021. Are narrow focus exhaustivity inferences Bayesian inferences? Frontiers in Psychology 12. 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.677223 ↗
  23. Szabolcsi, Anna. 2019. Unconditionals and free choice unified. In Blake, Katherine & Davis, Forrest & Lamp, Kaelyn & Rhyne, Joseph (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 29, 320–340. Los Angeles, CA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v29i0.4616 ↗
  24. Xiang, Yimei. 2020. Function alternations of the Mandarin particle dou: Distributor, free choice licensor, and ‘even’. Journal of Semantics 37(2). 171–217. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ ffz018 ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/alsop-2024-pragmatics-free-choice-em-any/