Fresh evidence from Free Choice Items (FCIs) in French question the current perception of the class. The role of some standard distinctions found in the literature is weakened or put in a new perspective. The distinction between universal and existential is no longer an intrinsic property of FCIs. Similarly, the opposition between variation-based vs intension-based analyses is relativized. We show that the regime of free choiceness can be characterized by an abstract constraint, that we call Non Individuation (NI), and which can be satisfied in different ways that match current distinctions. NI says that the information conveyed by a sentence containing a FCI should not be reducible to a referential situation, that is a situation in which particular individuals satisfy the sentence in the current world. The widely used resource of modal variation becomes a particular scenario of free-choiceness, not its 'essence'. In fact, we show that under certain conditions, FCIs can occur in episodic, non modal, sentences, a fact that NI can accommodate. We also discuss more fine-grained aspects of the semantics of FCIs, such as their emotional colour.
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For each of these principles we rely on previous work, although our formulations are sometimes slightly different from the original theses. Our main sources for principle (1) are Ladusaw (1992) and Dowty (1993). We derive principle (2) from our understanding of Ladusaw (1991) and previous work by Corblin (1996) and Tovena (1996). Our main inspirations for principle (3) are Jespersen (1917), Dahl (1979) and Horn (1989). 2 The multiple expression problem In this paper, negation refers to a semantic notion required in the description of natural languages for which the negation of classical logic can be taken as a workable translation. A negative sentence is a sentence for which the best translation in logic will put the translation of the main verb in the scope of the logical operator for negation. A negative expression, or negative for short, is the specific lexical item responsible for this translation. In many natural languages, including Romance languages, the multiple expression problem is due to the fact that the occurrence of one negation in the translation is triggered by more than one negative. This can be seen as a problem because if the meaning of a negative is negation, then two negatives should end up as two negations. Note that combining more than one negation is not a problem for semantics, negation being a recursive operator in the semantic language used for translation. Rather, this multiple expression might be seen as a problem for compositionality. This is a problem too, if one looks at the data in terms of economy or optimality. Why should a meaning be expressed by the repetition of lexical items where one of them would be enough to do the job? Many detailed studies of many languages have tackled the expression of negation in a single clause and meet the multiple expression problem. To quote but a few, Jespersen (1917),
This paper analyses Italian verbs such as mordicchiare and French verbs such as chantonner as pluractional verbs. Morphologically, these forms are the result of a pseudo-derivational process and cannot be cut up into two morphs, /mord/ + /ikkj/ for Italian and similarly for French, each with its own, independent contribution. The pseudo suffix is attributed submorph status, a solution that captures the fact that /ikkj/ in mordicchiare and similar submorphs point to two operations of semantic decomposition. One decomposition step operates at the level of the event, and signals the presence of a plurality of phases, another step operates on a participant to the event, and captures its partial affectedness. The output of the decomposition varies depending on the lexical entry.
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