Speaker: Benjamin Spector — Institut Jean Nicod, ENS
Date/Time: 3:30 PM, Friday 04/06
Location: 32-141
Title: Generalized Scope Economy (Joint work with Clemens Mayr, ZAS Berlin)
Abstract:
It is a well-known fact that the relative scopes of several operators
in a sentence do not always correspond to their relative surface
positions. In order to account for such cases, covert scope shifting
operations (CSSOs) such as QR and reconstruction have been assumed to
apply, resulting in hierarchical structures that deliver the correct
interpretation. Such operations, however, are not completely free to
apply. One type of restriction on the application of CSSOs has been
extensively studied, namely, locality constraints that prevent a CSSO
from covertly moving an operator out of a so-called scope-island.
There is, however, a second type of restriction that has not been
studied to the same extent. In many cases, a CSSO seems to be able to
shift the scope of a certain expression x in a sentence S but cannot
affect the scope of some other expression call it y in a
structurally parallel sentence where x has been replaced with y.Consider for instance the following pair:
(1) Every student did not attend the talk
> Inverse-scope possible: Not every student attended the talk
(2) More than two students did not attend the talk
> Inverse-scope marginal: ??? No more than two students attended the talk.In other words, the possibility of applying a CSSO seems to depend in
part on the nature of the expressions that it targets. As far as we
know, the only attempt to account for these types of restrictions in a
general way is due to Beghelli & Stowell (1997). These authors propose
to account for all the observed restrictions in terms of a
cartographic analysis. They assume that CSSOs such as QR or
reconstruction target different landing sites depending on the surface
position and the nature of the item that undergoes the operation.
Although this proposal has broad empirical coverage, it is not really
explanatory, since it does not provide a principled account of why
the hierarchy of landing sites is the way it is. We develop an
alternative approach whose goal is to account for the observed
restrictions in a unified way. We propose a new licensing
constraint on CSSOs, which is itself a generalization of Foxs 2000
Scope Economy. In short, we argue that a CSSO can only apply if the
resulting interpretation is not logically stronger than or equivalent
to the surface-scope interpretation. We will show that such a
principle makes correct predictions for a broad range of structures,
discuss how exactly it should be implemented, and address apparent
counterexamples.