The interpretation and processing of quantifiers in structurally ambiguous sentences: insights from child language

• Applicant: Professor Hedde Zeijlstra, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 385963910

It is a well known fact that sentences like *All the pirates did not go back to the ship* and *The captain did not dance with a mermaid* generate so-called scope ambiguities: they yield different interpretations depending on whether the operators all/a and not are interpreted according to the order in which they appear (surface-scope) or the reversed order (inverse-scope). As a result, the former sentence can be interpreted as *not all the pirates went back to the ship* or *no pirates when back to the ship* and the latter sentence can be interpreted as *the captain did not dance with any mermaid* or *there is a mermaid with whom the captain did not dance*. Remarkably, to obtain the inverse-scope interpretation from analogous sentences in which all occurs after not and a occurs before not is much more difficult if not impossible. Sentences *The captain did not eat all the strawberries* and *A mermaid did not dance with the captain* only seem to allow the surface-scope interpretation. Is there a general principle that explains this pattern? The theoretical generalization that correctly predicts the availability of inverse-scope builds on the concept of logical strength. Inverse-scope interpretations are available only if they are not logically stronger than the correspondent surface-scope reading. I.e. *not all the pirates went back to the ship* is not logically stronger than *no pirates went back to the ship* because there is at least one situation in which the former sentence is true and the latter is false, such as a situation in which only one pirate went back to the ship but other pirates did not. Built on these observations we address the following key questions in this project: (i) Why and how does logical strength determine the availability of scopal interpretations? (ii) Is there a semantic filter that blocks the syntactic mechanism switching the scope of the operators? (iii) Is this behavior due to the interplay of pragmatic inferences (e.g. scalar implicatures) that are known to be governed by logical strength? (iv) Does prosodic intonation ultimately signals which interpretation is conveyed by the speaker? Research on language acquisition constitutes an optimal mean to obtain insights aimed to addressing the questions above, in that it allows to identify the different phases in which children acquire relevant grammatical aspects may control scope ambiguities (pragmatic strengthening, prosody, etc.). So, the extent to which scope shift is linked to pragmatic inferencing, prosody and other processing factors can be revealed by how children cope with these phenomena in interaction.The present proposal involves a series of six experiments with adults and 4- to 5-year-old children to collect offline semantic judgments and online eye tracking data. The results will lead to a novel and better understanding of scope ambiguity and its interaction with syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic principles and processing factors.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Nivedita Mani; Professor Dr. Markus Steinbach