On Alternatives in Imperatives: The Case of Romanian 'vreun'
Résumé
This paper discusses the distribution of the Romanian epistemic indefinite 'vreun' in imperatives. Its presence in (certain kinds of) imperatives is unexpected, in view of its exclusion from non-epistemic modal contexts (Falaus 2010, 2014). To capture the data, I follow Aloni (2007) and assume that disjunctive imperatives can give rise to weak free choice inferences ('that the addressee does A or B'). I argue that the imperatives in which 'vreun' is licensed sustain this weak free choice inference (whereby the imperative is presented as one possible course of action among others), an inference that is identical to the inference we find in epistemic contexts (the so-called 'partial variation' inference). This enables a uniform characterization of the contexts of occurrence of 'vreun'.
Domaines
Linguistique
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