Past Event

Luis Alonso-Ovalle, McGill University (Joint work with Paula Menéndez-Benito, University of Göttingen)

Across languages, we find indefinites that trigger modal inferences in non-modal contexts. Some of these ‘modal indefinites’, like Spanish algún or German irgendein, signal ignorance on the part of the speaker. Other modal indefinites, like Spanish un NP cualquiera, the Korean -na indeterminates, the French n’importe qu- indefinites, or German irgendein, can signal indifference on the part of an agent: the sentence in (1), for instance, is interpreted as saying that Juan took a book at random.

(1) Juan cogió un libro cualquiera,
Juan grabbed a book CUALQUIERA
‘Juan took a random book.”

Agent indifference implications have not received much attention in the recent literature (some exceptions are Choi (2007), Choi and Romero (2008), and Zabbal (2004)). Many issues remain unanswered: What type of modality does ithe agent indifference component convey? What is the status of this component? Is it truth conditional? A conversational implicature? A presupposition? A conventional implicature? Can ignorance and indifference be analyzed along the same lines? Are the answers to the questions above the same for all languages? If not, what is the range of cross-linguistic variation?

To address these questions, we will probe into the interpretation of Spanish un NP cualquiera. We will claim: (i) that the agent indifference component that this indefinite conveys is truth-conditional, (ii) (contra Choi and Romero (2008)) that the modal component that this indefinite contributes requires projecting the modal possibilities from a particular event, in line with recent work on modality (Hacquard, 2006; Kratzer, 2011)), and (iii) that speaker ignorance and agent indifference should not be given a uniform analysis.

References
CHOI, Jinyoung (2007). Free Choice and Negative Polarity: A Compositional analysis of Korean
polarity sensitive items. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
CHOI, Jinyoung and ROMERO, Maribel (2008). Rescuing Existential Free Choice Items in Episodic
Sentences. In O. Bonami and P. Cabredo Hoffner (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics
7, vol. 7. 77–98.
HACQUARD, Valentine (2006). Aspects of Modality. Ph.D. thesis, MIT.
KRATZER, Angelika (2011). What ‘Can’ Can Mean. Talk presented at SALT 21.
ZABBAL, Youri (2004). A Compositional Semantics of the French

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