Cyclic scope and processing difficulty in a Minimalist parser
Robert Pasternak, Thomas Graf
January 2021
 

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 a clause-bounded operation, 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 difficulty in which parsing Logical Form (LF) movement is costly for the human parser, which in conjunction with the 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.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005009
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: published in Glossa
keywords: quantification, scope, scope processing, formal parsing, minimalist grammars, semantics, syntax
previous versions: v1 [February 2020]
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