On the semantics of indefinite free relatives

Unlike Germanic, Italian and many other languages from different language families allow wh- clauses to occur as the complement of existential predicates and be interpreted as indefinites. I call these wh- clauses indefinite free relatives. A compositional semantics will be given for indefinite free relatives that is based on Jacobson’s (1995) proposal for the semantics of wh- words. In a nutshell, I will argue that indefinite free relatives denote a singleton set which contains only a maximal plural individual. The matrix predicate takes this set as its complement and asserts its non-emptiness.