The pragmatics of free choice any

Abstract

In this paper, I examine previous claims by Menéndez-Benito (2005; 2010) and Dayal (2013) that You may read any book entails Every book may be read on its own. In light of several key counterexamples, including those raised by Chierchia (2013) and Szabolcsi (2019), I argue that this is not an entailment at all, but a particularly robust implicature that arises in the pragmatics. In order to derive this implicature, I combine Szabolcsi’s semantics for universal free choice items (FCIs) with a formal pragmatic model in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. I update Champollion et al.’s (2019) RSA model of free choice with technical innovations from Franke & Bergen (2020) to model how a listener interprets an utterance containing the universal FCI any given a range of possible exhaustified parses. This pragmatic model predicts the robustness of the implicature observed by Menéndez-Benito and Dayal, and further predicts that it is more stable across varied contexts than other implicatures arising from the same utterance.

Keywords

• free choice
• alternatives
• exhaustivity
• game theory
• RSA