Universal Free Choice and Innocent Inclusion

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to provide a global account of universal Free Choice (FC) inferences (argued to be needed in Chemla 2009b). We propose a stronger exhaustivity operator than proposed in Fox (2007), one that doesn’t only negate all the Innocently Excludable (IE) alternatives but also asserts all the ``Innocently Includable'' (II) ones, and subsequently can derive universal FC inferences globally. We further show that Innocent Inclusion is independently motivated by considerations that come from the semantics of only (data from Alxatib 2014). Finally, the distinction between Innocent Exclusion and Innocent Inclusion allows us to capture differences between FC inferences and other scalar implicatures.