Propositional anaphora and alternatives in the semantics of in which case

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a wealth of research on appositive relative clauses. In this paper, we look at a closely related construction: parentheticals introduced by in which case (IWCs). We show that IWCs share many major properties with appositives, but also one major difference: they impose a requirement for epistemic alternatives to the content of their anchor. We develop a formal account of IWCs extending AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson 2015’s formalism and show how together with a suitable alternative requirement, this derives their similarities and differences. Finally, we turn to examine the compositional source of this requirement, building on Moltmann 2021’s proposal for other instances of the English noun case in other constructions and arguing that this is the source of the requirement.