Free Choice Readings of Disjunctive Sentences and Implicatures of Existence

Abstract

There are cases where a disjunction sentence reads like the corresponding conjunction sentence. It is called a Free Choice Effect(= FCE). Simons(2005), Klinedinst(2006) and Fox(2006) attempted to account for the effect, but they are not fully successful. In this paper, I employ the positive features of their analyses and avoid the problems with them. Simons's analysis implies that each disjunct makes a separate meaning contribution. No syntactic analyses like Klinedinst's or Fox's, which take FCEs as part of scalar implicatures, can account for FCEs. I claim that in a disjunction structure, each disjunct makes a separate meaning contribution to a quantifier which has wide scope over the disjunction structure. I call them implicatures of existence. The implicatures should in turn contribute to the meaning of the whole sentence