Discourse, Diversity, and Free Choice

Abstract

You may have beer or wine' suggests that you may have beer and you may have wine. Following Klinedinst, I argue that this "free choice" effect is a special kind of scalar implicature, arising from the application of an unspecific predicate to a plurality (of worlds). I show that the implicature can be derived from general norms of cooperative communication, without postulating new grammatical rules or hidden lexical items. The derivation calls for an extension to the classical neo-Gricean model. I give independent arguments for this extension. * Thanks to Paolo Santorio and three anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions.