Assessing the availability of inverse scope in German in the covered box paradigm
- This paper presents the results of a novel experimental approach to relative quantifier scope in German that elicits data in an indirect manner. Applying the covered-box method (Huang et al. 2013) to scope phenomena, we show that inverse scope is available to some extent in the free constituent order language German, thereby validating earlier findings on other syntactic configurations in German (Rado & Bott 2018) and empirical claims on other free constituent order languages (Japanese, Russian, Hindi), as well as recent corpus findings in Webelhuth (2020). Moreover, the results of the indirect covered-box experiment replicate findings from an earlier direct-query experiment with comparable target items, in which participants were asked directly about the availability of surface scope and inverse scope readings. The configuration of interest consisted of canonical transitive clauses with deaccented existential subject and universal object QPs, in which the restriction of the universal QP was controlled for by the context.
Author details: | Gisbert FanselowORCiDGND, Malte ZimmermannORCiDGND, Mareike PhilippORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5766 |
ISSN: | 2397-1835 |
Title of parent work (English): | Glossa : a journal of general linguistics |
Publisher: | Open Library of Humanities |
Place of publishing: | London |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2022/05/10 |
Publication year: | 2022 |
Release date: | 2023/04/19 |
Tag: | German; covered-box; experimental semantics; free constituent order; inverse scope |
Volume: | 7 |
Issue: | 1 |
Number of pages: | 24 |
First page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 24 |
Funding institution: | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation); [317633480 -SFB 1287] |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Gold Open-Access |
License (German): | CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |