Quantifier Scope in Russian

Abstract

This paper documents certain quantifier scope ambiguities in Russian and argues that these are derived by means of a covert syntactic movement operation, Quantifier Raising (QR). By doing so, it argues against the popular “frozen scope” view of Russian (Ionin 2003) by showing that optional, non-local QR past vP level must be available in the language in exactly the contexts where it is available in English. Syntactic evidence for the parallelism comes from Inverse Linking, Antecedent Contained Deletion and other contexts that have been argued to point to the existence of QR in English. Additionally, evidence for the availability of subject Reconstruction for scope in Russian (contra Ionin 2003) strongly suggests that the mechanism deriving ambiguity in basic SVO sentences in Russian must involve subject Reconstruction plus object QR to vP, exactly as has been argued to be necessary for English in Johnson (2000; 2001). The conclusion that Russian possesses QR with the same properties known from English suggests that the availability of QR in certain languages or certain constructions should not be tied to the unavailability of Scrambling since Russian also exhibits Scrambling. This conclusion thus carries important implications for other languages still currently taken to be similarly scope frozen due to the availability of Scrambling.