Free Choice Questions

Polar questions like “May I go to the park or to the beach?” give rise to Free Choice-like inferences. The “yes” answer to these questions corresponds to the permission to freely choose between going to the park and going to the beach. “No” corresponds to Dual Prohibition, i.e., prohibition to go to either place. We empirically tested whether these intuitions are true. In this project, I collected data that can allow us to establish the source of these inferences and evaluate predictions made by current theories of Free Choice extended with question semantics.