Processing: free choice at no cost

Authors

  • Emmanuel Chemla LSCP, CNRS/EHESS/ENS, Paris Author
  • Lewis Bott Cardiff University Author

Abstract

A disjunctive sentence such as (1) standardly carries the conjunctive inference that (2)a and (2)b are true. (1) (2) John is allowed to eat an apple or a banana. a. John is allowed to eat an apple. b. John is allowed to eat a banana. This phenomenon is known as Free Choice (FC) permission (Kamp, 1973). Current formal models tend to treat FC inferences as a special type of scalar implicature (mostly building on Kratzer and Shimoyama’s 2002 insight, see, e.g., Schulz, 2003; Fox, 2006; Klinedinst, 2006; Alonso-Ovalle, 2008; Chemla, 2008, 2009; Franke, 2011). We present the first processing study of FC. Our results go against the expectations of recent formal analyses, and show that, unlike scalar implicatures, FC inferences come at no processing cost.

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Published

2011-12-01

Issue

2011: Proceedings of the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium

Section

Conference Proceedings

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Chemla, E., & Bott, L. (2011). Processing: free choice at no cost. Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium, 126-131. https://platform.openjournals.nl/PAC/article/view/22502