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  • CP-Negation and the Domain of Quantifier Raising
  • Eric Potsdam

It is widely stated that the scope of quantifiers is clause-bound (Chomsky 1977, May 1977, Farkas 1981, 1997, Fodor and Sag 1982, Aoun and Hornstein 1985, Beghelli 1993, Abusch 1994, Hornstein 1995, Fox and Sauerland 1997, and numerous others). This claim is based on the observation that (1a) has no reading in which reviewers covary with plays, while (2a) does.

  1. 1.

    1. a. A reviewer thinks every play will fail this season.

    2. b. *[TP every playi [TP a reviewer thinks [CP ei will fail this season]]]

  2. 2.

    1. a. A reviewer attended every play this season.

    2. b. [TP every playi [TP a reviewer attended ei this season]]

Current theories capture the contrast by making Quantifier Raising (QR), the covert syntactic operation that assigns scope to quantified noun phrases (QPs), clause-bound. Only in (2a), in which the universally quantified QP every play and the indefinite a reviewer are [End Page 674] clausemates, can the universal QP raise to scope over the indefinite, yielding the Logical Form representation (LF) in (2b). This operation is prohibited for (1a) because the two NPs are not clausemates; hence, the LF in (1b) is illicit.

While this observation seems empirically well-grounded, its theoretical basis is less secure. Such clause-boundedness makes QR rather more restricted than one would expect a representative Ā-movement to be (see Reinhart 1997, Cecchetto 2004 for discussion). In what follows, I recap Fox's (1995, 2000) theory of Scope Economy, which provides an explanation for QR's clause-boundedness. I then introduce new data involving the interaction between QPs and certain instances of negation that are problematic for this approach. I conclude by sketching an alternative.

1 An Economy-Based Account of Quantifier Raising

Like many who research QR, Fox (1995, 2000) implicitly adopts what Beghelli and Stowell (1997) call Scope Uniformity: QR applies uniformly to all QPs and is not landing-site-selective. Any QP can be adjoined to any (nonargument) XP where it is interpretable. Further restricting this quite general assumption, economy considerations dictate that QR can apply only if it has an effect on semantic interpretation.1 QR cannot apply if the derivation without it would yield the same meaning.

  1. 3. Scope Economy (Fox 2000:23)
    QR must have a semantic effect.

Fox (2000:62-66) proposes that the clause-boundedness of QR follows from Scope Economy. By (3), every application of QR must induce a change in semantic interpretation. At the same time, given that QR is an instance of Ā-movement, each application is subject to locality constraints on movement, which Fox formulates as Shortest Move.2

  1. 4. Shortest Move (Fox 2000:23)
    QR moves a QP to the closest position in which it is interpretable.

The impossibility of cross-clausal QR follows from a tension between Scope Economy and Shortest Move. QR that does not obey Shortest Move is illicit, but QR that targets a clausal node, obeying Shortest [End Page 675] Move, will not normally yield a new semantic interpretation, violating Scope Economy.

Returning to (1a), the two constraints derive the unavailability of the non-clause-bound reading of the universal QP in this example, repeated below as (5a). Two potential LFs for the wide scope reading of the QP every play are given in (5b-c). In (5b), every play raises directly to a position above the matrix subject; however, this violates Shortest Move since adjunction to the embedded clause is a closer interpretable position. In (5c), the QP every play targets the embedded clausal node to satisfy Shortest Move; however, Scope Economy is now violated because the move has no semantic consequence. As a result, the embedded QP has no extra, wide scope interpretation, as desired.

  1. 5.

    1. a. A reviewer thinks every play will fail this season.

    2. b. *[TP every playi [TP a reviewer thinks [CP[TP ei will fail this season]]]]

    3. c. *[TP every playi [TP a reviewer thinks [CP ei [CP[TP ei will fail this season]]]]]

2 Overriding Clause-Boundedness

Fox (2000:63) points out that the Scope Economy account makes a surprising prediction: QR's clause-boundedness could be overridden...

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