Cyclic scope and processing difficulty in a Minimalist parser

Abstract

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 clause-bounded, 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 in which parsing Logical Form (LF) movement is costly for the human parser, which in conjunction with 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.

Clitic left dislocation and inverse scope: Plain indefinites versus numerals

“…As a last piece of evidence in favor of the locality restriction hypothesis, we would like to come back to the results of our experiment with CLLD-ed plain indefinites. As we noticed in Section 2.2.4, the fact that there is a minor – but still considerable (around 10%) – acceptance rate for inverse scope with CLLD plain indefinites, indicates that the lack of inverse scope is not attributed to ungrammaticality but rather to a processing cost associated with a locality constraint in QR (see Wurmbrand 2018; Pasternak & Graf 2021 for a discussion).…”