Abstract
This paper examines the effect of intonation contour on two types of scopally ambiguous constructions in English: configurations with a universal quantifier in subject position and sentential negation (e.g., Every horse didn’t jump) and configurations with quantifiers in both subject and object positions (e.g., A girl saw every boy). There is much prior literature on the relationship between the fall-rise intonation and availability of inverse scope with quantifier-negation configurations. The present study has two objectives: (1) to examine whether the role of intonation in facilitating inverse scope is restricted to this configuration, or whether it extends to double-quantifier configurations as well; and (2) to examine whether fall-rise intonation fully disambiguates the sentence, or only facilitates inverse scope. These questions were investigated experimentally, via an auditory acceptability judgment task, in which native English speakers rated the acceptability of auditorily presented sentences in contexts matching surface-scope vs. inverse-scope readings. The results provide evidence that fall-rise intonation facilitates the inverse-scope readings of English quantifier-negation configurations (supporting findings from prior literature), but not those of double-quantifier configurations.
Highlights
Intonation has been identified as having several functions in English, such as distinguishing sentence types, emphasizing certain words/phrases, and revealing a speaker’s attitude (Lee, 1955)
The second goal of this paper is to examine whether the fall-rise intonation makes inverse scope obligatory, per Jackendoff (1972), or whether it only facilitates inverse scope, but is still compatible with surface scope as well, per most later accounts (Ward & Hirschberg, 1985)
The fact that we find an effect of prosodic contour only for quantifier-negation sentences and not for doublequantifier sentences is consistent with prior literature on English, which attributes the role of the fall-rise contour to the specific semantic/ pragmatic properties of the quantifier-negation configuration
Summary
Intonation has been identified as having several functions in English, such as distinguishing sentence types, emphasizing certain words/phrases, and revealing a speaker’s attitude (Lee, 1955). We are concerned with how intonation does, or does not, affect scope interpretation. Our focus here is on two types of scopally- ambiguous sentences. The first type is sentences with sentential negation and a universal quantifier such as all or every in subject position. The subject quantifier scopes over negation; the resulting reading is paraphrased in (1a). On the inverse-scope reading, negation scopes over the universal quantifier, resulting in the reading paraphrased in (1b). The two readings are disambiguated in a situation in which some of the men went and some did not; in such a scenario, (1) is false on the surface-scope reading but true on the inverse-scope reading
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