Pragmatics in the interpretation of scope ambiguities

This paper presents a corpus study of pragmatic factors involved in interpreting potentially ambiguous sentences with negation and universal quantifiers, as demonstrated by the Russian sentence Oni ne uspejut vsjo eto sdelat’ ‘They won’t have time to do all this.’ Ambiguity in such sentences results from potential differences in scope assignment. If negation scopes over the quantifier, we get the interpretation of partial negation: ‘They will manage to do some of these things, but not everything.’ If negation scopes over the verb, we get total negation: ‘They won’t manage to do anything.’ This study is based on Russian and English data extracted from a variety of corpora. We demonstrate that while syntactic conditions where scope ambiguity is possible are different for Russian and English, in situations when both languages allow it, speakers rely on the same pragmatic mechanisms for disambiguation that are based on Gricean cooperation principle and shared background knowledge. Disambiguation is facilitated by lexical markers, different for verb-negated and quantifier-negated readings, and similar in Russian and English. We show that the interpretation of the quantifier is pragmatically different for verb-negated and quantifier-negated readings (emphatic in the former case and quantificational in the latter), and lexical markers of each reading are semantically and pragmatically consistent with this difference. Namely, verb-negated readings occur primarily in the context of demonstrative pronouns in their pragmaticalized meaning of negative assessment and negatively connoted nouns, while quantifier-negated readings occur in the context of verbs with quantitative semantics and quantitative implicatures that consolidate the interpretation of quantification.

Quantification

Quantification is abundant in natural language and is one of the most studied topics in generative grammar. Sentences with multiple quantifiers are famously ambiguous with respect to their quantifier scope, representing a type of ambiguity related to, but not necessary the same as, structural ambiguity. Two key questions in the psycholinguistic study of quantification are: (i) how does the human processor assign quantifier scope? and (ii) how and under what circumstances is this scope assignment reanalysed? The investigation of these questions lies at the intersection of psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics. The chapter summarizes both strands of research, and discusses experimental data that played an essential role in the (psycho)linguistic theorizing about the topic of processing quantification and quantifier scope.

Echo Questions in the Minimalist Program

English echo questions present numerous challenges to the analysis of interrogatives, including (a) simple wh-in-situ (You saw who?); (b) apparent Superiority violations (What did who see?); (c) apparent verb movement without wh-movement (Has Mary seen what?); and (d) requisite wide scope only for echo-question-introduced wh-phrases (underlined in these examples—only who in What did who see? is being asked about). Such apparently contrary features may be explained in terms of independently necessary scope assignment mechanisms and a complementizer that subordinates the utterance being echoed and “freezes” its CP structure. No norms of question formation are violated.

Weak Crossover as a Scope Phenomenon

This article investigates the proper characterization of the condition that is responsible for weak crossover effects. It argues that the relevant condition belongs to scope theory and that weak crossover arises from the way in which scope is determined in syntax. This implies that weak crossover can occur whenever an operator must take scope over a pronoun, even when the pronoun and the operator are not coindexed and the intended interpretation of the pronoun is not as a variable bound by the operator. It also implies that, when an operator is for some reason assigned scope in an exceptional manner and escapes the usual syntactic restrictions on scope assignment, bound variable licensing will be exceptionally allowed as well.