Abstract
A common view in the theoretical literature is that quantifier raising (QR) is a clause-bounded operation. But in a paper published in Glossa, Wurmbrand (2018) argues that (i) QR is not clause-bounded, and the apparent clause-boundedness of QR is due to the human parser’s difficulty in processing extraclausal QR; and (ii) the relative difficulty of extraclausal QR depends on the size of the embedded clause from which QR takes place. She then proposes a theory of scope processing in which parsing Logical Form (LF) movement is costly for the human parser, which in conjunction with independently motivated assumptions about A′-movement generates the desired results. In this paper, we accept Wurmbrand’s descriptive observations and proposed syntax but offer an alternative, rigorously defined metric of scope processing difficulty that makes precise quantitative predictions. Our proposal is formalized with Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997) and expands recent work by Kobele et al. (2013), among others, that uses this formalism to account for numerous processing phenomena. Our metric correctly handles Wurmbrand’s observations as well as cases that are problematic for her account, and points the way toward an explanatory theory of scope processing.
Highlights
We offer a novel theory of scope processing difficulty that is very much in the spirit of Wurmbrand’s insight about Logical Form (LF)-Phonetic Form (PF) mismatches
While we have argued against the particular theory of scope processing difficulty that Wurmbrand offers to account for these observations, we have proposed an alternative metric that is in keeping with a proposed revision that she suggests, in which processing difficulty is in part dependent on the severity of the mismatch between PF and LF representations
By using a top-down Minimalist Grammars (MGs) parser to formulate our analysis of scope processing difficulty, we have added to a growing body of work dedicated to using such parsers to account for a variety of syntactic processing effects
Summary
Each sentence in (2) only allows for a reading in which some person claims that Sue is polygamous (∃ > ∀), and not one in which different people have made opposing claims about who Sue is married to (∀ > ∃) The absence of this second reading suggests that every man cannot undergo QR to a position outside its embedded CP, where it can scope over someone in the matrix clause. We adopt a framework pioneered by Kobele et al (2013) that derives processing predictions from the memory usage of the top-down MG parser introduced by Stabler (2013) This rigorous computational foundation allows us to precisely quantify processing difficulty and derive strong processing predictions, and illuminates why LF-PF mismatches are costly for the human parser and situates this insight within a broader theory of how the human parser’s memory usage affects sentence processing. We point out two particular problems with her account that suggest that the relevant factor is how much LF and PF differ from each other (Section 2.2), an intuitive idea that will be fully developed in Sections 3 and 4
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