The article proposes an analysis of imperatives and possibility and necessity statements that (i) explains their differences with respect to the licensing of free choice any and (ii) accounts for the related phenomena of free choice disjunction in imperatives, permissions, and other possibility statements. Any and or are analyzed as operators introducing sets of alternative propositions. Free choice licensing operators are treated as quantifiers over these sets. In this way their interpretation can be sensitive to the alternatives any and or introduce in their scope.

Abstract The question of whether epistemic modals contribute to the truth conditions of the sentences they appear in is a matter of active debate in the literature. Fueling this debate is the lack of consensus about the extent to which epistemics can appear in the scope of other operators. This corpus study investigates the distribution of epistemics in naturalistic data. Our results indicate that they do embed, supporting the view that they contribute semantic content. However, their distribution is limited, compared to that of other modals. This limited distribution seems to call for a nuanced account: while epistemics are semantically contentful, they may require special licensing conditions.

One analysis of non-deontic should treats it as having less-than-universal quantification over the epistemically accessible worlds – the worlds that, for all the speaker knows, could be the actual world. This analysis is based on the intuition that should assertions are weaker than are assertions of epistemic must sentences. Problems with the traditional analysis, however, indicate that there must be a different reason why these should sentences express weaker propositions. This paper argues that non-deontic should can involve either epistemic or metaphysical modality; both are weaker than epistemic must because should does not trigger a presupposition that things work out normally, while must does. An initially problematic attempt to extend this analysis to deontic should prompts a revision to Kratzer’s theory of modals, in which the division of labor between the modal base and the ordering source is rethought.

College London, under the supervision of Tom Maibaum and while receiving a studentship funded by Hewlett-Packard Research Labs, Bristol, UK. The author thanks his supervisor, tutors, and Hewlett-Packard for their support. Comments are welcome. Errors and misunderstandings are the author’s. The title of this work Computational Jurisprudence is a term already in circulation as of July, 2003. As a search in Google shows, the only two current uses are by Thorne McCarty, Professor of Computer Science and Law at Rutgers University and the founder of the International Association on Artificial Intelligence and the Law, and the University of Amsterdam for their Department of Computational Jurisprudence. The term aptly

interpreted modal auxiliaries. Tancredi (2007) and Huitink (2008) observed that von Fintel and Iatridou’s proposed constraint, the Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP), does not apply uniformly: it does not apply to strong quantifiers headed by each. We consider the ECP effect in light of the differential behavior of each and every in the environment of wh-, negative, and generic operators as described by Beghelli and Stowell (1997). Assuming that epistemic and root modals merge at two different syntactic heights (e.g. Cinque 1999) and that modals may act as unselective binders (Heim 1982), we extend Beghelli and Stowell’s topological approach to quantifier scope interactions in order to formulate a novel syntactic account of the ECP.