What do speaker judgments tell us about theories of quantifier scope in German?

Abstract

In this paper we use German data to evaluate configurational and multi-factor approaches to quantifier scope. Configurational theories derive scope relations syntactically at the level of Logical Form; semantic and pragmatic factors are either built into the syntactic representation or ignored, at least during the first derivational step. By contrast, multi-factor approaches consider syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of quantifiers as multiple constraints affecting quantifier scope. We examined predictions for quantifier scope in German of the configurational theory by Frey (1993) and of the multi-factor account by Pafel (2005). These fundamentally different approaches were tested in a series of picture verification experiments to assess scope preferences in doubly quantified German sentences. The results show that at least three factors affect the preferred scope. Our findings are neither fully consistent with Frey’s configurational theory nor with Pafel’s multi-factor approach; both theories made incorrect predictions for German doubly quantified sentences with a subject-before-object word order. For object-before-subject sentences, however, the experimental data by and large support the predictions of Pafel’s (2005) multi-factor approach.