Affiliation:
1. Leibniz-Center for General Linguistics (ZAS), Schützenstraße 18 10117 Berlin
2. Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794
Abstract
A common view in the theoretical literature is that quantifier raising (QR) is a clause-bounded operation. But in a paper published in Glossa, Wurmbrand (2018) argues that (i) QR is not clause-bounded, and the apparent clause-boundedness of QR is due to the human parser’s difficulty in processing extraclausal QR; and (ii) the relative difficulty of extraclausal QR depends on the size of the embedded clause from which QR takes place. She then proposes a theory of scope processing in which parsing Logical Form (LF) movement is costly for the human parser, which in conjunction with independently motivated assumptions about A′-movement generates the desired results. In this paper, we accept Wurmbrand’s descriptive observations and proposed syntax but offer an alternative, rigorously defined metric of scope processing difficulty that makes precise quantitative predictions. Our proposal is formalized with Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997) and expands recent work by Kobele et al. (2013), among others, that uses this formalism to account for numerous processing phenomena. Our metric correctly handles Wurmbrand’s observations as well as cases that are problematic for her account, and points the way toward an explanatory theory of scope processing.
Publisher
Open Library of the Humanities
Reference71 articles.
1. Anderson, Catherine. 2004. The structure and real-time comprehension of quantifier scope ambiguity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University dissertation.
2. Ken Hale
Cited by
2 articles.
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