Chapter 2. Persian quantifiers and their scope

Abstract

This paper investigates quantifiers and their scope in Persian, proposing that Persian is not a scope-rigid language, rather scope rigidity in this language is a construction-specific property controlled by scrambling. In other words, the availability of scrambling translates into lack of ambiguity (for similar arguments, see Hoji 1985, 1986 for Japanese; Ionin 2001 for Russian; Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012 for German). I further propose that in Persian, the nature and the size of scrambling is what dictates the presence or absence of scope ambiguity, whereby the vP-internal scrambling cases induce ambiguity while the vP-external ones do not. Examples from various sentences with two quantifiers show that although Persian exhibits a strong preference for surface scope in general, constructions involving inverse linking, for which only the inverse scope is possible, justify that a Quantifier Raising (QR) operation is available in this language, contradicting Karimi (2005). This paper draws on Bobaljik & Wurmbrand’s (2012) (B&W) constraint-based proposal and the negative correlation between scrambling and scope ambiguity.