Definite and Indefinite Free Choice Items: Evidence from English, French and Greek Evangelia Vlachou University of Utrecht 1 Introduction The meaning of freedom of choice (hereafter FC) and its expression in natural language has received a lot of attention the last forty years. 1 Vendler (1967) has been the first to observe that the English item any has a very special meaning that he calls freedom of choice. More precisely, (Vendler, 1967, 80) argues that the speaker in (1) claims that “no matter whom you select from among you, I can beat him”. Ladusaw (1979) baptizes this use of any as Free Choice Item (FCI): (1) I can beat any one of you. After Vendler, analyses on FCIs were primarily focused on their distribution in a crosslinguistic perspective (cf. Giannakidou (2001) and Jayez and Tovena (2005)). In the present paper, I leave aside the distribution of FCIs and concentrate on another very interesting and not documented phenomenon; the fact that only some are presuppositional. Based on novel data from English, French and Greek, I propose that this is due to a very rich inherentsemantics of FCIs; a cluster of quantificational properties and lexical semantic implications. 2 The facts Except for any, English Free Relatives formed by the particle ever, are also involved in the discussion on FCIs, being grammatical in modal contexts as shown in (2). I refer to them as English complex wh-items: (2) I can beat whoever you want. den Dikken and Giannakidou (2002), Giannakidou (2001), von Fintel (2000), Horn (2000a,b) and Quer (1998, 1999, 2000) equate any to English complex wh-items. However, a more detailed study shows that they differ. English complex wh-items, contrary to any, scope over negation: (3) I left before talking to anyone 2 (4) I left before inviting whoever was at the conference. Any scopes over negation only when preceded by just. (5) can be uttered in situations where there is the expectation that the speaker would talk to some person. This shows that any becomes presuppositional when preceded by just : (5) I left before talking to just anyone The examples above are consequently represented as follows: 1 I would like to thank Cleo Condoravdi, Francis Corblin, Anastasia Giannakidou and Henri˝ ette de Swart for valuable comments. This research is supported by the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). They are here cordially acknowledged. 2 Here, before is in its negative use © 2006 Evangelia Vlachou. Proceedings of the 2004 Texas Linguistics Society Conference, ed. Pascal Denis et al., 150-159. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.