Tying Free Choice in Questions to Distributivity

The idea that wh-phrases can quantify over generalized quantifiers emerged following two main observations: (i) disjunctive answers to modalized questions lead to free choice inferences if the wh-phrases’s restrictor is plural and (ii) questions with collective predicates do not lead to uniqueness presuppositions. Such proposals, however, fail to derive the connection between (i-ii) and plurality. We propose a novel analysis in which (i-ii) are derived via the presence of an existential distributivity operator. By tying these phenomena to distributivity, our analysis is able to establish the desired connection to plurality.