Abstract
The interaction of universal quantifiers and wh-phrases in questions, such as Which class did every student take?, gives rise to structural ambiguities. The availability of pair-list answers (Mary took Syntax, and Jane took Semantics) to such questions reveals whether the quantifier can take wide scope over the wh. In this paper, we use an acceptability judgment task to test whether, as some theoretical accounts suggest (e.g. May 1985), the quantifier position affects the likelihood of an inverse scope reading for distributive quantifiers, such as every and each. We show that pair-list answers remain less available for questions with object quantifiers than for questions with subject quantifiers even when the quantifier is each (contra Beghelli 1997). At the same time, speakers find pair-list answers to questions with each more acceptable than to questions with every, confirming that the distributivity force of a quantifier also plays a role. We discuss how these findings fit into the existing analyses of quantifier scope in relation to quantifier semantics and discourse structure.
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Notes
- 1.
Since functional answers are not the focus of this paper they will not be discussed further here.
- 2.
Chierchia derives pair-list answers from functional answers (see also Engdahl 1986; Déprez 1994b) In his view, when the QP binds the argument index on the trace, the bindings provides the domain of a function. It is then possible to spell out the function extensionally by listing its members, and eventually provide pairings of people from the domain and the range of the function \(love\{x,y\}\). Such pairings constitute the pair-list answer. While some authors derive PLAs from functional answers, others argue for a separate treatment(Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984).We do not independently test whether these answers are available in the same syntactic environments.
- 3.
The authors use a binomial logit-mixed model to test the effect of quantifier type on the probability of inverse scope. They report a \(\beta \) coefficient of 0.7 on the logit scale. Using the algorithm described in Gelman and Hill (2007), Brasoveanu and Dotlačil (2015) suggest that in order to get an estimate on a more intuitive probability scale we need to divide the coefficient by 4, giving us around 17% increase in probability of inverse scope for each compared to every.
- 4.
Lambrecht (1996) mentions that even though subjects are often found to be topics, the notions of topic and subject need not be conflated, as they do not always refer to the same individual in a sentence.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful for the valuable feedback we received at the Budapest Workshop on Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification.
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Achimova, A., Déprez, V., Musolino, J. (2018). Structural Asymmetry in Question/Quantifier Interactions. In: É. Kiss, K., Zétényi, T. (eds) Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 47. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91566-1_2
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