Quantificational topics: A scopal treatment of exceptional wide scope phenomena (review)

Quantificational topics is based on Cornelia Endriss’s (now Ebert) 2007 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Potsdam. The book develops a detailed analysis of the recalcitrant problem posed by exceptional wide-scope indefinites, that is, indefinites that take scope outside of syntactic domains that prevent it in the typical case. The main observation put forth in the book is that, in German, the indefinites that take exceptional wide scope are the ones that can be sentence topics. The set of indefinites that are sentence-topicable consists of singular and plural indefinites (ein ‘a’, manche ‘some’), bare numerals, and einige ‘several’; these are all and only the indefinites that can take exceptional wide scope in this language. The core idea is that exceptional wide scope is a side effect of sentence topicality (cf. Cresti 1995, Portner & Yabushita 2001). A detailed implementation of sentence topicality is proposed that has this effect (Ch. 6). Particularly important is an understanding of what it means for a quantifier to establish a sentence topic—it involves existential quantification over minimal witness sets. An important argument throughout the book is that scope is scope: genuine, plain wide-scope readings of indefinites are shown to be true and distinct scope readings (Ch. 3), and not amenable to treatments as ‘pseudo’ scope (Ch. 4).

Consider 1 (capitals indicate intonational sentence-topic marking, usually a rising tone).

1. 1. Wenn EIN  Dozent zur  Party kommt, gehe ich sofort    wieder.

   if  some lecturer to.the party comes  go  I    immediately again

     ‘If some lecturer comes to the party, I will leave immediately.’

If-clauses are islands for scope. Yet, a quantifier phrase containing an intonationally topic-marked quantifier not interpreted contrastively takes obligatory scope outside of them (E considers other islands as well). If the indefinite determiner were to lack this type of intonation, only a narrow-scope reading would be possible (local scope phenomena, that is, scopal relations inside of a single clause, are not considered in the book).

E shows that in German it is possible to correctly isolate the class of sentence-topicable indefinites with the help of independently motivated syntactic tests (Ch. 2). Tests for sentence topicality can vary, of course, from language to language, though E argues that some of the traditional tests for sentence topicality are not reliable. Following Reinhart (1981, 2004), E sides with the view that sentence topics are not necessarily familiar, specific, or given, so indefinites make possible sentence topics.

E takes sentence topics to be addresses for context updates (Reinhart 1981) and reasons that only those quantifiers for which a proper address can be derived will be able to serve as sentence topics, quantifiers not being the sort of items that constitute, just by themselves, proper addresses. A quantifier gives rise to a proper address only if its minimal witness set(s) (see appendix A.1.2 for the definitions) preserve meaning and anaphoric relations when used as proxy for the quantifier—this is the topic condition. The process of creating a proper address is understood as a separate speech act. The intuition behind the condition is that, when a proxy is used for a quantifier, truth conditions and anaphoric possibilities should be preserved. The topic condition is reproduced in 2 below (238).¹

1. 2. A quantifier G is topicable if, for all sets Y,

   1. a. ∃P [MW(P, G) & λR.R(Y))(F(P))] ≡ (λR. R(Y))(G), and

   2. b. all anaphoric possibilities which are available in c + (λR. R(Y))(G) remain available in c + ∃P [MW(P, G) & λR.R(Y))(F(P))].

Minimal witness sets of the quantifier three linguists are sets of linguists of cardinality three. This quantifier passes the topic condition because a sentence like three linguists came is truth-conditionally equivalent to ‘there is a set of three linguists and its members came’ (2a), and because all of the anaphoric possibilities available in it remain available in ‘there...