Rescuing Existential Free Choice Items in Episodic Sentences

Abstract

FCIs and episodic sentencesFree Choice Items (FCIs) are known to be ungrammatical in episodic sentences, whereas they can occur in generic sentences.For instance, English FCI any is not licensed in the episodic sentence (1), but is perfectly fine in the generic sentence (2).(1) *Anyone contributed to the fund.(Dayal, 1998) (2) Any bird flies.Interestingly, if a relative clause is added, the grammaticality status of (1) is ameliorated, as shown in (3).This kind of amending strategy was dubbed SUBTRIGGING by LeGrand (1975) and received a full attention in Dayal (1998).Rescuing by subtrigging is considered as a typical characteristic of (some type of) FCIs in languages like English (see Dayal 1995Dayal , 1998)).(3) Anyone who heard the news contributed to the fund.Note here that this subtrigging strategy does not work for all types of FCIs.Chierchia (2005) points out that, in Italian, subtrigging rescues the universal type of FCI qualsiasi, but not the existential counterpart uno qualsiasi.The same contrast holds for other Romance languages like Spanish: adding a relative clause improves the universal FCI cualquier in (4), but not the existential FCI un N cualquiera in (5).1,2 (4) a. *Ayer Yesterday Juan Juan tropezó stumbled con with cualquier CUALQUIER objeto.object 'Yesterday Juan stumbled against any object.' 1 As we will see (section 6), the rescuing effect of subtrigging consists of turning the episodic sentence into a semi-generic one, which in Spanish is typically accompanied by switching from perfective to imperfective aspect in the verb (Quer 2000, Menéndez-Benito 2005).The point we want to make here is that subtrigging and the concomitant verbal aspect change rescue the universal FCI in (4b) but not the existential FCI in (5b). 2 The following abbreviations are used in this paper: NOM (nominative), ACC (accusative), LOC (locative), TOP (topic), GEN (generic), NEG (negation), PAST (past tense), REL (relative clause marker), DEC (declarative ending), PERF (perfective), IMPERF (imperfective), SUBJ (subjunctive), and IND (indicative).

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