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When All Linguists Did not Go to the Workshop, None of the Germans but Some of the French Did: The Role of Alternative Constructions for Quantifier Scope

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Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 48))

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Abstract

In this paper, we will present crosslinguistic data on the interpretation of negation over quantifier scope in sentences like “All children did not go to the zoo.” Questionnaire data show that English as well as German speakers prefer a linear scope interpretation of the quantifier and the negation, where it is true for all children that they did not go to the zoo. French speakers, however, strongly prefer the inverse scope interpretation where some but not all children did not go to the zoo. The preference for linear scope is moreover stronger for German speakers than for English speakers. It diminishes with age for French and English, but not for German speakers. We will argue that language differences result from two constraints: the availability of a “close” alternative in the language and the topicality of a preverbal subject. An unambiguous alternative corresponding to inverse scope in the “all-not” construction can easily be achieved in English and German by fronting the negation as in “Not all children went to the zoo.” The corresponding construction is not available in standard French. A second questionnaire study shows that adding “Not…all” sentences in the experiment, thus increasing their availability, increases the linear scope preference in English. The particularly strong preference for linear scope in German will be argued to be linked to the stronger topicality of preverbal subjects in German main clauses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As we will show in this Chapter, inverse scope is not actually the preferred interpretation in this type of construction in English. We will come back to the question of why the word order demanding an inverse scope reading is used in English for (1) in the General Discussion.

  2. 2.

    Note, however, that we do not want to say that it is impossible to find an inverse scope preference in German (see for example Bader & Frazier, 2005, Exp. 5, for systematic inverse scope preferences). Interpretational preferences will depend on the details of the combination of quantifiers and the type of construction.

  3. 3.

    We want to thank Thomas Weskott for pointing us to this potential alternative explanation.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Pascal Amsili, Katy Carlson, and Thomas Weskott for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Céline Pozniak and Heather Burnett were of great help with respect to checking our materials in English and French. This work was supported by the French Research Agency (ANR-10-LABX-0083).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Paris Diderot University, CNRS, Paris, France

    Barbara Hemforth

  2. Center for Cognitive Science, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

    Lars Konieczny

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  1. Barbara Hemforth
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Correspondence to Barbara Hemforth .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Morehead State University, Morehead, KY, USA

    Katy Carlson

  2. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Charles Clifton, Jr.

  3. Linguistics Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA

    Janet Dean Fodor

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Hemforth, B., Konieczny, L. (2019). When All Linguists Did not Go to the Workshop, None of the Germans but Some of the French Did: The Role of Alternative Constructions for Quantifier Scope. In: Carlson, K., Clifton, Jr., C., Fodor, J. (eds) Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_9

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