Exceptional Scope: The Case of Spanish

Abstract

Unlike run-of-the-mill quantifiers, indefinites can escape islands. Schwarzschild (J Semant 19(3):289–314, 2002) connects this behavior with domain restriction: On his analysis, indefinites are existential quantifiers that get apparent exceptional scope when their domain is restricted to a singleton. The Spanish indefinites un and algun provide an ideal testing ground for Schwarzschild’s theory. Since un can be a singleton indefinite but algun cannot (Alonso-Ovalle and Menendez-Benito, Nat Lang Semant 18(1): 1–31, 2010, (2008b) Minimal domain widening. In: Abner N, Bishop J (eds) Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, pp 36–44), we only expect un to have exceptional scope. This chapter tests this prediction experimentally by looking at the behavior of these indefinites in relative clauses and the antecedent of conditionals. The results yield a modulation of the predicted pattern: (1) In relative clauses, un can have exceptional scope, but exceptional scope is also available for algun to some extent; (2) in conditionals, exceptional scope is impossible for algun and hard for un. This difference between the two types of islands is puzzling for most theories of indefinites. We put forward an account cast within Kratzer and Shimoyama’s ((2002) Indeterminate pronouns: the view from Japanese. In: Otsu Y (ed) Proceedings of the 3rd Tokyo conference on psycholinguistics, pp 1–25) Hamblin semantics, on which indefinites denote sets of alternatives that expand until they meet an appropriate operator. Under this account, the differences between the two islands come about through the interplay of the alternatives introduced by the indefinite and the operators associated with each syntactic configuration.