Indefinites as Fossils

The article discusses theoretical repercussions of a number of diachronic corpus studies establishing the patters of development of marked indefinites across languages (Aguilar-Guevara et al. 2012). The focus is on the case of wh-based free choice (FC) indefinites. After summarising the key results of two studies on the historical development of Spanish cualquiera and Dutch wie dan ook, we present a semantic analysis of the diachronic phases of these two FC indefinites demonstrating how historical data provide additional support for the abstract operators posited by analyses in Alternative Semantics style (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, Aloni 2007, Menéndez-Benito 2010).