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Share Paper 3672

Inverse Scope in Scrambling Languages: The Case of Bangla
Ishani Guha, Swarnendu Moitra, and Paul Marty
550-558 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper reports on a sentence-picture verification experiment investigating the correlation between word order and quantifier scope in Bangla, a verb-final language with scrambling. The experiment tested the comprehension of canonical SOV and scrambled OSV sentences involving a non-monotonic quantifier in the subject position (e.g., exactly three NPs) and a strongly distributive quantifier in object position (e.g., each NP). Results show that (i) both sentence types were perceived by Bangla speakers as ambiguous between a Surface Scope (SS) and an Inverse Scope (IS) reading, and (ii) speakers had a strong preference for IS over SS with the SOV sentences. These findings contradict the common idea that doubly quantified sentences in scrambling languages lack IS, and raise a challenge for existing theories that posit a strict correspondence between linear order and scope at LF (a.o., Bobaljik and Wurmbrand 2012). They suggest instead that the availability of SS and IS is partly determined by the scopal preferences associated with the interacting quantifiers, and that these preferences can outweigh the preference for LF-PF parallelism in the disambiguation process. The paper discusses the relevance of this dimension of analysis for explaining the present data as well as for rationalizing seemingly conflicting results from the current literature on IS in scrambling languages.

Published in

Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Robert Autry, Gabriela de la Cruz, Luis A. Irizarry Figueroa, Kristina Mihajlovic, Tianyi Ni, Ryan Smith, and Heidi Harley
Table of contents
Printed edition: $645.00