On the distribution of scope ambiguities in Polish

Abstract

Polish, an SVO language with relatively free constituent order, has a scope extending mechanism of quantifier raising that shows remarkable similarities to quantifier raising in English. The paper shows experimentally that SVO and OVS structures in Polish are scopally ambiguous. Furthermore, ditransitive structures are scopally rigid when the indirect object precedes the direct object but ambiguous when the direct object precedes the indirect object (Łęska 2019), a fact which we show to hold independently of whether the indirect object is realized as a DP or a PP. The phrase structure of ditransitive VPs in Polish mirrors the geometry that Janke & Neeleman (2012) proposed for English ditransitives, though the category of the indirect object again plays no role. Pulling these findings together, we adapt Bruening’s (2001) analysis of scope freezing in English to our own analysis of Polish.Our findings contradict the idea that free word order languages lack quantifier raising and/or reconstruction for scope. The results are, however, fully compatible with multifactorial approaches to word order and scope.

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“… See Cinque (1993);Reinhart (1995);Selkirk (1995);Zubizarreta (1998) i.a. on the relation between word order and Focus spreading and Stjepanović (1999) as a classic work on Slavic regarding the what-happened/word order/focus test.4 SeeGrabska & Abels (2022) on the distribution of scope ambiguity and scope freezing in Polish which largely argues against the view of argument structure defended here.…”