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gizmo.usc.edu>In his review of Aoun & Li, SYNTAX OF SCOPE, Tony Kroch asks about the extent of cross-linguistic variation in quantifier scope judgments. His question is motivated by a) Aoun & Li's argument for universal scope assignment principles in the grammar, yet b) Aoun & Li report cross- linguistic differences in Chinese and English, namely that both (1) and (2) are ambiguous in English, whereas only (2) is ambiguous in Chinese: 1. Every man loves a woman. (Kroch's (1)) 2. Everyone was arrested by a woman. (Kroch's (3)) Like many linguists, Aoun & Li interpret scope judgments as owing to the grammar; Kroch nicely summarizes their particular analysis of English and Chinese. In contrast, my argument below might be termed "the psycholinguistics of scope." I suggest that a substantial amount of the variation in scope judgments in English (e.g. Kroch's examples (5-9) and others I discuss below) are attributable at least in part to psycholinguistic factors, namely the nature of ambiguity resolution processes during language comprehension, so that it is a mistake to assume that a particular pattern of scope judgments necessarily reveal something about syntax/LF. I then speculate on some ways in which cross-linguistic variation in scope judgments might emerge. Although I use a small sample of Aoun & Li's data in this discussion, it should be clear that I am not offering an alternative to their account, which goes far beyond the few sentences I discuss here. Instead I am making a more general claim that ANY scope-ambiguity judgment data may reflect the parser at least as much as the grammar. Though I try to be brief, laying out the relevant pieces of psycholinguistic theory takes time; you are hereby warned that this is a long message. When speakers of a language report that they can't assign wide scope to X--some quantified NP in a multiply-quantified sentence--linguists often interpret this judgment as evidence that a structure in which X receives wide scope violates some principle in the grammar. A psycholinguistic account would place the explanation on the nature of ambiguity resolution processes. Work in syntax and syntactic ambiguity resolution offers an analogy: Speakers of English generally report that they cannot recover a well-formed interpretation for "The horse raced past the barn fell," but neither psycholinguists nor syntacticians would say that the sentence is ungrammatical. Instead, we believe that there is something about the parsing process, specifically the ambiguity resolution process, that makes it nearly impossible to assign an interpretation to this ambiguity. Indeed, much psycholinguistic work has revealed a great deal about what it is that makes ambiguity resolution for this sentence impossible, while other sentences with the identical structure don't pose a problem (e.g. "The men arrested in the raid were taken downtown."). The scope equivalent of this example is that the interpretation with wide scope on the quantified NP "X" is perfectly grammatical, but there is something about the nature of ambiguity resolution processes such that speakers cannot resolve the ambiguity in a way that yields wide scope on X. What does the theory of ambiguity resolution have to offer treatments of scope? Scope ambiguity is largely neglected in studies of ambiguity resolution, but there are some things we can note about how ambiguity resolution appears to work in this case. The following principles concerning how comprehenders resolve quantifier scope ambiguity are stated informally here and are meant to be only descriptive; Kurtzman & MacDonald (1993) offer a somewhat different treatment and discuss other principles proposed in the literature. Another good source for discussion of processing principles is Fodor (1982). I. Lexical Preference (as noted by a number of linguists, including Kroch in his dissertation). As part of its lexical representation, each quantifier term has a particular "strength" in which it tends to take wide scope over other quantifiers. Quantifiers such as "one," "each" and "someone" strongly tend to take wide scope; "every" and "everyone" are weaker. II. Structural Preference. Quantified NPs in certain positions are more likely to be assigned wide scope than are other QPs. The specific variants proposed in the literature suggest that the ambiguity resolution mechanism prefers to assign wide scope to the following sorts of quantified NPs: Quantified Subjects (more likely to take wide scope than objects), topics (compared to non-topics), first QPs (the first quantified NP the comprehender encounters in the sentence preferentially gets wide scope over subsequently encountered QPs in the sentence), c-commanding NPs, Agents, External Arguments, etc. For most of this discussion, we don't need to be more specific than this vague description of structural constraints. III. Weighing constraints. Constraints like (I), (II), and others can converge and conflict. A comprehender's preferences for one scope interpretation is strong when multiple constraints converge to promote wide scope on a particular phrase, but when several constraints conflict, speakers are less likely to have a clear preference in scope interpretation. This effect of multiple constraints on the degree of ambiguity is known to be a general property of ambiguity resolution processes and is not about scope in particular. Next we consider three variations in scope judgments in English which can be attributed to these processing constraints. First, we know from constraint (I) that "someone" tends to take wide scope over "everyone," and from (II) that quantified subjects (and/or Agents, etc.) tend to take wide scope over quantified non-subjects (non-Agents, etc.). From III, we'd expect stronger scope interpretation preferences when I and II converge (i.e. when "someone" is the subject, as in (3)) and weaker preferences when (I) and (II) conflict, as in (4). 3. Someone loves everyone. 4. Everyone loves someone. A number of linguists (e.g. Fodor, 1982, for similar sentences) have noted that in (3) "someone" very strongly takes wide scope, whereas (4) seems much more ambiguous, and the joint effect of quantifier terms and structural position has been confirmed in psycholinguistic experiments with large numbers of sentences and experiment participants (Kurtzman & MacDonald, 1993). Of course it's not surprising to find processing considerations affecting the choice between two grammatical alternatives such as (3-4), but preferences in the next example have been attributed to the ungrammaticality of one of the alternatives. This example comes from sentences (6) and (8) in Kroch's review of Aoun & Li, repeated below. Kroch's (6) John assigned one student every problem. Kroch's (8) Mary assigned every student one problem. Aoun & Li note that (6) appears to be unambiguous with wide scope on "one student," but Kroch notes that (8) is ambiguous, an unexpected outcome from Aoun & Li's perspective. Recall from (I) that "one" takes wide scope more strongly than "every," and that one of the formulations of (II) is for surface linear order--the first-encountered quantified phrase preferentially gets wide scope over subsequent ones. We see these two constraints converging to promote wide scope on "one student" in Kroch's (6), and they conflict in Kroch's (8), yielding the judgment of ambiguity. On this analysis, the extent to which these examples are / are not ambiguous is not attributed to the syntax/LF but rather emerges from the weighing of constraints during the ambiguity resolution process. [To forestall some replies from List subscribers, I should say here that I offer the linear order constraint for the sake of simplicity and don't believe it is actually the correct description of the processing constraint(s) that operate here. There are clear counterexamples to linear order discussed in Kurtzman & MacDonald, and linear order certainly fails to capture the fact that there is something special about scope assignment in double object constructions such as Kroch's (6 & 8). For example, compare Kroch's (6) with a non-dative sentence with the same quantifiers and linear order: 5. John praised one student every day. Unlike Kroch's (6), (5) seems quite ambiguous to me. The correctness of linear order aside, I do want to embrace the processing nature of the argument. Kroch's contrast between (6&8) is analogous to the contrast between the garden path "horse raced" sentence and the easily parsed "The men arrested in the raid were taken downtown." When two sentences with the same structure have different ambiguity resolution outcomes as a function of the lexical items in the sentences, one should start looking for explanations in the processor, not (only) in the nature of syntax or LF.] Finally, consider actives and passives, in (1-2), repeated here: 1. Every man loves a woman. (Kroch's (1)) 2. Everyone was arrested by a woman. (Kroch's (3)) Kurtzman & MacDonald note that several linguists have reported that passives seem more ambiguous than actives, and psycholinguistic experiments strongly confirmed this pattern. Our experiment participants treated the passives as completely ambiguous, but for actives they were generally willing to accept wide scope on the object (e.g. "a woman" in (1)) only 20-30% of the time (the exact percentage varied with the wide scope tendencies of the quantifier terms, as addressed in (I)). One way to account for this pattern is to say that the structural constraint sketched in (II) is actually two constraints, perhaps one that favors wide scope on subjects and another that favors wide scope on Agents. These two converge in (1) and conflict in (2), yielding stronger scope interpretation preferences for actives than passives. [Again I don't intend to advocate this particular solution, and I don't want to leave the impression that psycholinguists name a constraint for every new judgment. We expect the scope ambiguity resolution constraints to be quite general, just as they appear to be for ambiguity resolution at other levels of linguistic representation that have received more study in psycholinguistics.] CROSS-LINGUISTIC VARIATION. Given these data from both judgments and psycholinguistic experiments that passives are far more ambiguous than actives for English speakers, Aoun & Li's contrast between Chinese and English can be viewed not as qualitatively different but rather as differing in degree. In English, passives are ambiguous and actives are slightly ambiguous, and in Chinese, passives are ambiguous and actives are apparently not ambiguous at all. One possible account of these differences could preserve the universal nature of scope assignment processes (via the grammar or the processor) by relying on cross-linguistic variation in quantifier terms. Like any lexical item, quantifier terms may not have exact translations from one language to the next, and it is certainly possible that near-translations of some quantifiers may not be exactly equivalent in (I), the strength to which they take wide scope in different languages. For example, a native speaker of Lebanese Arabic tells me that the Arabic equivalent of "everyone" has a stronger tendency to take wide scope in her language than in English, so that the relative ambiguity of Arabic equivalents of (3-4) are not the same as in English. Given the demonstrated effects of quantifier terms on the degree of ambiguity, we might speculate that the Chinese-English differences for (1-2) reflect differences in the wide scope tendencies of the quantifier terms in (1-2). I have absolutely no data about the wide-scope tendencies of quantifier terms in Chinese, and so this suggestion is truly speculative. Perhaps some Chinese speakers on the List can address this issue, e.g. by observing to what if any extent the judgments of ambiguity in Chinese versions of (1-2) vary as a function of the particular quantifier terms used in the sentence. In sum, I have suggested that in using judgments of ambiguity as a reflection of the nature of the grammar, linguists should not overlook the contribution of ambiguity resolution processes that are part of language comprehension. I argue that in the same way that we do not want to invoke grammatical explanations for the incomprehensibility of multiply center-embedded sentences and garden path sentences, we may not want to ascribe grammatical explanations to some scope interpretation preferences, including preferences so strong that one interpretation appears impossible/ungrammatical. Of course I am not saying that there is NO role for the grammar here; instead I mean that one needs to determine which phenomena are best attributed to the grammar and which to the processor. As the field of ambiguity resolution is one of the largest and most productive in psycholinguistics, I suggest that the process of sorting out grammatical vs. processing effects would proceed more rapidly if linguists did not evaluate these issues entirely on (syntax and LF) theory-internal grounds but rather investigated what ambiguity resolution theory has to say about how ambiguity interpretation preferences emerge. Maryellen C. MacDonald University of Southern California mcmMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue