Abstract
In this paper we describe and analyse a particular scope marking construction that has not received attention in the generative literature so far: scope marking into relative and noun-associate clauses, which we will refer to as adjunct scope marking. In this type of scope marking system, a wh-element in an embedded adjunct clause takes matrix scope when it occurs in a clause that syntactically and semantically modifies a wh-phrase in the matrix. These facts provide unambiguous evidence for the indirect dependency approach to wh-scope marking advocated by Dayal (1994, Natural Language Semantics, 2, 137–190; 2000, Scope Marking: Cross linguistic variation in direct dependency. In U. Lutz, G. Müller, & A. V. Stechow (Eds.), Scope Marking (pp. 157–193). Amsterdam: John Benjamins), where the embedded question provides a semantic restriction for the matrix wh-element. Dayal’s theory will be extended to provide a compositional analysis of these constructions. The extended approach argues for a generalization of the question-formation procedure to different clause types, as first advocated in Sternefeld (2001, Partial movement constructions, pied piping, and higher order choice functions. In C. Féry, & W. Sternefeld (Eds.), Audiatur Vox Sapientiae. A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow (pp. 473–486). Berlin: Akademieverlag).
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We would hereby like to thank Rajesh Bhatt and Thomas Ede Zimmermann for detailed discussion and valuable insights about the issues presented here, as well as Marcel den Dikken, István Kenesei and Kálmán Dudás for comments on the present manuscript and on earlier versions of the material (Lipták, 2004a, b). A special note of thanks is due to the four anonymous reviewers of this article, whose spot-on comments helped us to make this piece of work a better (and a more readable) one. All mistakes and shortcomings are our own. The research of Anikó Lipták is supported by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research). The research of Malte Zimmermann is supported by DFG (German Science Foundation) as part of the SFB 632 ‘Information Structure’.
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Lipták, A., Zimmermann, M. Indirect scope marking again: a case for generalized question formation. Nat Language Linguistic Theory 25, 103–155 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-006-9008-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-006-9008-3