Sentences with disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier, Every A is P or Q, tend to give rise to distributive inferences that each of the disjuncts holds of at least one individual in the domain of the quantifier, Some A is P & Some A is Q. These inferences are standardly derived as an entailment of the meaning of the sentence together with the scalar implicature that it is not the ca...

Various recent studies have claimed that children have difficulty using contrastive stress in language comprehension (Solan, 1980; Gualmini et al., 2003; McDaniel et al., 1992; Reinhart, 1999, 2004) and that failure to access alternatives generated by focus may create problems for interpreting sentences with only (Paterson et al., 2003). Other researchers have shown that children also have diff...

The article defines the relevance or utility of an imperative in terms of how far it can help in increasing the probability of the occurrence of a desirable future world. In terms of this notion, we account for (i) the potential of imperatives to license free choice any in their scope; and (ii) the free choice effects of disjunctive and any-imperatives. 1 Choice-offering imperatives 1.1 Or in i...