The interpretation of coercion constructions (to begin a book) has been recently considered as resulting from the operation of type changing. For instance, a phrase of type o (object) is coerced to a phrase of type e (event) under the influence of the predicate. We show that this procedure encounters empirical difficulties. Focussing on the begin/commencer case, we show that the coercion interpretation results both from general semantic processes and properties of the predicate, and we argue that it is best represented at the lexical level. The solution is formulated in the HPSG formalism, where the lexical description of heads includes a specification of the argument and articulates syntax and semantics. We propose that the properties attached to the complement remain the same as they are oustside the construction, but that the semantics of the predicate is enriched to include an abstract predicate of which the complement is an argument.

Fresh evidence from Free Choice Items (FCIs) in French question the current perception of the class. The role of some standard distinctions found in the literature is weakened or put in a new perspective. The distinction between universal and existential is no longer an intrinsic property of FCIs. Similarly, the opposition between variation-based vs intension-based analyses is relativized. We show that the regime of free choiceness can be characterized by an abstract constraint, that we call Non Individuation (NI), and which can be satisfied in different ways that match current distinctions. NI says that the information conveyed by a sentence containing a FCI should not be reducible to a referential situation, that is a situation in which particular individuals satisfy the sentence in the current world. The widely used resource of modal variation becomes a particular scenario of free-choiceness, not its 'essence'. In fact, we show that under certain conditions, FCIs can occur in episodic, non modal, sentences, a fact that NI can accommodate. We also discuss more fine-grained aspects of the semantics of FCIs, such as their emotional colour.

The present paper offers a contrastive examination of French items that require some knowledge of the speaker and items that require some ignorance. We relate this difference in a systematic way to the well-known problem of 'identifiability' in epistemic logic. In addition to providing a more precise analysis, this identification-based investigation leads us to two findings. First, non-identification ('ignorance') is actually a particular manifestation of the more general phenomenon of free-choiceness, which has received much attention lately. Studying non-identification helps us to gain a better understanding of the varieties of free-choiceness. Second, identification ('knowledge') has to be distinguished from specificity, understood as wide scope of an existential quantifier, and to be evaluated in the perspective of a full-fledged epistemic theory including epistemic agents and descriptions. This questions the scope-based analyses of determiners like un certain in French and a certain in English and gives a central place to the phenomenon of relativity of description, whose importance is independently motivated in recent work on reference. 'An animal must be fed with care' b. ??Un animal quelconque doit être soigneusement nourri 'Any animal must be fed with care' c. Un chat doit avoir un jouet quelconque 'A cat must have some toy'

The experimental literature on the pragmatic abilities of bilinguals is rather sparse. The only study investigating adult second language (L2) learners (Slabakova, 2010) found an increase of pragmatic responses in that population relative to monolinguals. The results of studies on early bilingual children are unclear, some finding a significant increase in pragmatic responses in early bilingual children (preschoolers) relative to monolinguals (Siegal et al., 2007), while another (Antoniou and Katsos, 2017), testing school children, does not. We tested adult French L2 learners of English and Spanish (in their two languages) as well as French monolingual controls in Experiment 1 and Italian-Slovenian early bilingual children (in both languages) and Slovenian monolingual controls in Experiment 2. Our results were similar to those of Antoniou and Katsos (2017) in early bilingual children, but different from those of Siegal et al. (2007). We found no pragmatic bias in adult L2 leaners relative to adult monolinguals.