The Non-Individuation Constraint Revisited: When to Produce Free Choice Items in Multi-Party Dialogue

In this paper we establish a set of con- ditions on the production of free choice items (FCI) in multi-party dialogue. Thus, we first observe that indefinite construc- tions are produced when speakers try to lead their addressees to access general, scalar rules, called topo¨i. These rules are used in reaching certain conclusions. However, the hearers need to be lead to access topo¨i when they do not manage to do this directly from definite sentences. The ability of the hearers to access topo¨i from definite sentences is assessed by in- specting the history of their public com- mitments in dialogue: if certain commit- ments are made, then it is abductively in- ferred that a certain topos was used; if so, then the hearers do not need to be "ex- posed" to utterances containing indefinite constructs. Secondly, an indefinite con- struction can be linguistically materialized as a FCI when it is not reducible to a referential situation (the non-individuation constraint). We thus propose a way of for- malizing the non-individuation constraint in a multi-party dialogue setting, using public commitments as actual worlds, and a calculus-based formalism for match- ing the production of indefinite constructs to the accesses to topo¨i.