Semantic scope in Q-float constructions:: An experimental investigation
- Autores: Eman Al Khalaf, Bassil Mashaqba
- Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 282, 2023, págs. 1-15
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Researchers have long assumed that the semantic scope of floating quantifiers is frozen with respect to scope-taking elements. This fact, among others, has been used to motivate an adverbial analysis of floating quantifiers and to argue against stranding/movement analyses. More recent work has cast doubt on this assumption, showing that in many languages, floating quantifiers and numerals can exhibit inverse scope. This paper contributes to this debate by experimentally investigating semantic scope of floating quantifiers with respect to negation in (American) English. The results of a picture truth-value task reveal that Q-float does not affect quantifier scope with respect to negation; just like non-floating quantifiers, floating quantifiers exhibit inverse scope as well as surface scope. This result is significant in not only providing support for movement analyses, but also in showing that the distribution of floating quantifiers can be a reliable diagnostic of the positions of lower copies in a movement dependency.
