Across languages, we find indefinites that trigger modal inferences. This article contributes to a semantic typology of these items by contrasting Spanish algún with indefinites like German irgendein or Italian uno qualsiasi. While irgendein-type indefinites trigger a Free Choice effect (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002; Chierchia 2006), algún simply signals that at least two individuals in its domain are possibilities. Additionally, algún, but not irgendein, can convey that the speaker does not know how many individuals satisfy the existential claim in the (...) world of evaluation. We contend that the two types of indefinites impose different constraints on their domain of quantification: irgendein and its kin are domain wideners (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002), whereas algún is an ‘anti-singleton’ indefinite (its domain cannot be restricted to a singleton). This, together with the fact that algún does not require uniqueness, allows us to derive the contrast between irgendein and algún by using the pragmatic reasoning presented by Kratzer and Shimoyama. (shrink)

This paper deals with the interpretation and distribution of universal Free Choice (FC) items, such as English FC any or Spanish cualquiera. Crosslinguistically, universal FC items can be characterized as follows. First, they have a restricted distribution. Second, they express freedom of choice: the sentence You can take any card conveys the information that the addressee is free to pick whichever card she chooses. Under standard assumptions, the truth conditions of sentences like You can take any card are taken to (...) be captured by formalizations in which a universal quantifier ranging over individuals has wide scope over the possibility modal. The crucial observation that informs the account in this paper is that this type of formalization cannot capture the freedom of choice component. I will argue that in order to derive the right interaction between possibility modals and FC items, we need to add an exclusiveness condition to the standard wide scope paraphrases. The same proposal that guarantees freedom of choice will automatically account for the distribution restrictions of FC items. The formal implementation of this proposal is cast in the Hamblin semantics proposed in Kratzer and Shimoyama (Indeterminate phrases: The view from Japanese, 2002). (shrink)

Across languages, we find indefinites that overtly mark a speaker’s lack of knowledge: they signal that the speaker is unable to give any further information about who or what satisfies her existential claim (Becker, 1999; Haspelmath, 1997). From now on, we will refer to the marking of the speaker’s lack of knowledge as an epistemic effect and to the indefinites that induce epistemic effects as epistemic indefinites.

This paper provides a systematic description and analysis of the non-predictive use of the Italian future. Several authors claim that, on this use, the Italian future is an evidential (Squartini 2001, Mari 2010, Eckardt and Beltrama 2019, Frana and Menéndez-Benito 2019 ). Others argue that the non-predictive future does not directly contribute an evidential signal (e.g., Giannakidou and Mari 2018, Farkas and Ippolito 2022 ). We side with the evidential camp. From an empirical standpoint, we present the results of a (...) battery of tests that show that the non-predictive future patterns with evidentials cross-linguistically. From a theoretical standpoint, we put forward an analysis that combines a slightly modified version of the proposal for evidentials in Davis et al. ( 2007 ) with Schlenker’s ( 2007 ) view of expressive content. On this account, the Italian evidential future (i) lowers the quality threshold required to perform a successful speech act (Davis et al. 2007 ) and (ii) triggers an evidential presupposition relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modeled after Schlenker’s analysis of expressives). Our treatment of the evidential component as an expressive presupposition opens up a new perspective on the study of evidentiality and highlights the need for further detailed empirical studies exploring the extent to which this perspective is applicable cross-linguistically. (shrink)

Across languages, we find indefinites that trigger modal inferences. Some of these indefinites, like Spanish un NP cualquiera or the Korean -na indeterminates (Choi 2007) convey indifference on the part of an agent. In this paper, we assess whether a number of proposals on the market can be extended to account for the indifference component of un NP cualquiera.

Weak determiners have both a presuppositional and a non presuppositional reading. Two ways of accounting for this fact have been proposed. The Ambiguity Approach (Partee 1989, Diesing 1992, de Hoop 1992) posits that weak determiners are ambiguous. The Pragmatic Approach (Büring 1996) claims that we do not need to postulate an ambiguity in the semantics: the presuppositional reading arises as a result of presuppositions triggered by topic/focus marking. In this paper we explore the possibility that both theories are needed. We (...) present as evidence the behavior of two Spanish weak determiners, unos and algunos. Algunos can get a presuppositional reading independently of topic/focus marking, as predicted by the Ambiguity Approach. Unos, on the other hand, exhibits the behavior predicted by the Pragmatic Approach: it is presuppositional only when marked either as contrastive topic or as focus. (shrink)

How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in _The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19_ _e_ _congrès international des linguistes_, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013 ), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents novel evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on a class of Spanish relative clauses that host verbs inflected in the subjunctive. Subjunctive in Romance is standardly taken to be licensed only (...) in a subset of intensional contexts. However, in our relative clauses, subjunctive is exceptionally licensed in extensional contexts. At the same time, the interpretation of these relative clauses still involves modality, a type of modality that targets the goals of the agent of the main event. We argue that the pattern displayed by these relative clauses follows straightforwardly if subjunctive is associated with a modal operator that, like modal indefinites (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito in _Journal of Semantics_ 35(1):1–41, 2017 ), can project its domain from a volitional event. Overall, our proposal supports the event-based analysis of mood (Kratzer in Evidential mood in attitude and speech reports. Talk delivered at the 1st Syncart Workshop, Siena, July 13, 2016 ; Portner and Rubinstein in _Natural Language Semantics_ 28:343–393, 2020 ) and extends its application beyond attitudinal and modal complements. (shrink)