The Non-Individuation Constraint Revisited: When to Produce Free Choice Items in Multi-Party Dialogue∗

In this paper we establish a set of conditions on the production of free choice items (FCI) in multi-party dialogue. Thus, we first observe that indefinite constructions are produced when speakers try to lead their addressees to access general, scalar rules, called topoı̈. These rules are used in reaching certain conclusions. However, the hearers need to be lead to access topoı̈ when they do not manage to do this directly from definite sentences. The ability of the hearers to access topoı̈ from definite sentences is assessed by inspecting the history of their public commitments in dialogue: if certain commitments are made, then it is abductively inferred that a certain topos was used; if so, then the hearers do not need to be “exposed” to utterances containing indefinite constructs. Secondly, an indefinite construction can be linguistically materialized as a FCI when it is not reducible to a referential situation (the non-individuation constraint). We thus propose a way of formalizing the non-individuation constraint in a multi-party dialogue setting, using public commitments as actual worlds, and a λ calculus-based formalism for matching the production of indefinite constructs to the accesses to topoı̈.