Long Distance Indefinites and Choice Functions

Indefinites are notorious for permitting long distance (LD) interpretations, that is, for exhibiting the apparent ability to take scope out of syntactic islands. This article reviews a family of approaches to LD interpretations that appeal to the notion of a choice function. Within this family, we will distinguish two branches. The proposals in one branch take their cue from Discourse Representation Theory (Heim 1982; Kamp 1981), adopting the view that the existential import of indefinites can be separated from the semantics of the indefinite article. Proposals in the second branch capitalize on another striking feature of indefinites, namely the availability of so‐called functional interpretations (e.g. Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984; Hintikka 1986). One main result reported is that LD interpretations come in two different kinds, corresponding to the two choice function approaches reviewed. Another result is that existential quantification over choice functions comes at a cost: to prevent the derivation of unattested interpretations, certain restrictions on the scope of this quantification must be stipulated.