Ignorance, indifference, and individuation with wh-ever
Ignorance, indifference, and individuation with wh-ever
Wh-ever phrases give rise to implications of ignorance or indifference. Previous analyses fold these implications into the truth-conditional or presuppositional content of wh-ever and posit a variation condition requiring non-rigid reference of the wh-ever description across possibilities in a modal domain, such as the speaker’s epistemic state. This chapter shows first that variation based on non-rigidity is not strong enough to account for the precise form of the ignorance implication. Secondly, the ignorance or indifference implication is obligatory only with singular wh-ever phrases. The chapter proposes an analysis which unifies the different uses and solves both these problems. It relies on property-based individuation and associates contextually determined alternatives to wh-ever phrases which yield more specific descriptions. The ignorance and indifference implications result from the enriched meaning contributed by the alternatives and their locus of discharge.
Keywords: free relatives with -ever, ignorance, indifference implications, individuation, property-based indeterminacy, alternatives, global vs. local alternative discharge
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