Information structure, syntax, and pragmatics and other factors in resolving scope ambiguity

Abstract

The paper is a corpus study of the factors involved in disambiguating potential scope ambiguity in sentences with negation and universal quantifier, such as ``I don't want talk to all these people'', which can alternatively mean `I don't want to talk to any of these people' and `I don't want to talk to some of these people'. The relevant factors are demonstrated to be largely different from those involved in disambiguating lexical polysemy. They include the syntactic function of the constituent containing ``all'' quantifier (subject, direct complement, adjunct), as well as the deepness of its embedding; the status of the main predicate and ``all'' constituent with respect to the information structure of the 6utterance (topic vs. focus, given vs. new information); pragmatic implicatures pertaining to the situations described in the utterances.

Tasks

Reproductions