A Viability Constraint on Alternatives for Free Choice

This chapter takes the universal force of free choice items (henceforth FCIs) to be an implicature that arises when an assertion with existential force interacts with a set of lexically triggered exhaustified alternatives, as proposed by Chierchia (to appear). It departs from him in capturing the distribution of FCIs through a Viability Constraint on alternatives, adapting the notion of fluctuation in Dayal (2009) to the view of FCIs as existential. A substantive consequence of the proposed viability constraint is that FCIs can only ever be licensed if they take wide scope over modals (of the appropriate sort). The chapter establishes that apparent counterexamples involve nontrivial interactions between FCIs and modality. When the FCI is complex it can participate in split-quantification, with one part taking scope over the modal and the other taking scope under it. Alternatively, if there are two modals, the FCI can be scopally lower than one but still be licensed because it has scope over the other. A striking confirmation of this approach comes from imperatives. Though long thought to unconditionally admit FCIs, it is shown here that this is not so. In addition to accounting for the more nuanced empirical generalization regarding imperatives, the viability constraint is argued to be generally a simpler way of predicting the distribution of FCIs than the one proposed by Chierchia.