The Grammar of Scope

Abstract

The program of research that seeks a ”Natural Logic” to which the forms of natural language are transparent has been frustrated by the existence of ambiguities of scope in interpretations for multiply quantified sentences, which appear to require grammatical operations that compromise the strong assumptions of syntactic/semantic transparency and monotonicity made under that program. Examples of such operations include covert movement at the level of logical form, abstraction or storage mechanisms, and proliferating type-changing operations.

The paper examines some interactions of scope alternation with syntactic phenomena including coordination, binding, and relativization. Starting from the assumption of Fodor and Sag, and others, that many expressions that have been treated as generalized quantifiers are in reality non-quantificational, expressions, and using Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) as a grammatical framework, the paper presents an account of quantifier scope ambiguities according to which the available readings are projected directly from the lexicon by the combinatorics of the syntactic derivation, without any independent manipulation of logical form and without recourse to syntactically unmotivated type-changing operations.