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cs.umn.edu>With apologies for the delay, here is the promised summary of responses to my query regarding the interpretation of the sentences 1. Every woman doesn't walk. 2. Every woman runs and doesn't walk. 3. Every woman doesn't run and walks. I had three questions: whether any of the examples is scope- ambiguous (and if so, which ones), whether the quantifier has wide or narrow scope in unambiguous examples, and whether any of the examples seems structurally odd. In addition to subscribers to LINGUIST (of whom 28 responded) I sent paper queries to my colleagues here in the philosophy department at Minnesota and to our graduate students, eliciting 7 more responses. Not all of these are included in the tabulation below since not every respondent answered the questions I asked and and of those who did not all did so in a way I could understand. At any rate, here are the semantic judgements and the number of people reporting each: None ambiguous, quantifier having wide scope in all three: 7 None ambiguous, quantifier having narrow scope in 1 and wide scope in 2-3: 2 1 ambiguous and 2-3 unambiguous with quantifier having wide scope: 9 1 and 2 ambiguous, 3 unambiguous with quantifier having wide scope: 1 Unclassifiable responses: 6 I also asked whether any of the examples seemed structurally odd. Some of the people in the 'unclassifiable' category above responded that they're *all* odd and that they couldn't make head nor tail of any of them. A few people had exactly the opposite response -- didn't see anything strange anywhere. Six people explicitly reported finding 3 odd (but without any comment on 1 or 2). To the extent that a tendency can be determined here, it appears to be this: there's a general preference for giving wide scope to the quantifier when it comes first, though the preference is stronger in cases like 2-3 than it is in simple sentences. Sentences like 3 also appear to be troublesome. A few people indicated explicitly that what bothered them about it was that they expected the second verb to be *walk* rather than *walks*. Perhaps this is the point at which I should reveal the reason for my interest in these examples. My judgements are that 1 is ambiguous and that 2-3 are not, the quantifier having wide scope. Further, while I find 1-2 acceptable, I experience a garden path in regard to 3. I wanted to know whether it was just me or if there were others who responded similarly; evidently there are, though other patterns emerge as well. My reasons for being interested have to do with some work I'm presently doing on the interaction of quantification and negation. Not unexpectedly given that not everyone who responded is a linguist, I experienced some resistance in taking my query at face value, resulting in a few cases in some rather ill-tempered outbursts of knuckle-rapping prescriptivism. Two of my colleagues here went so far as to vehemently excoriate anyone who would presume to associate the 'wrong' interpretation with (1). To quote them directly: Colleague A: "I'm a logician and trained to be sensitive to these distinctions. It's a COMMON MISTAKE [original emphasis] in English to say 'Every F is not G' for 'Not every F is G'." Colleague B: "(1) is a poor way of saying 'no woman walks'." Quite independently, John Nerbonne reminded me of sentences like 'All is not lost', in which the quantifier clearly has narrow scope. (Likewise, it occurs to me, for 'All that glisters is not gold'.) So haha on you guys. The contrubitors, to the extent that I can identify them, were: Mark Baltin Leslie Barrett Wayles Browne Sherri Condon Matthew Dryer David Gil gsvapi Michael Hand Bill Hanson Jeff Hellman Greg Kaebnick John Lee Doug Lewis Stavros Macrakis Debbie Mandelbaum Mike Maxwell Ellen Morse-Gagne Karen Mullen Eleanor Olds Bachelder And Rosta Dale Russell Steven Schaufele SE Margaret Winter My thanks to all who contributed; now I leave you to duke out the disagreements among yourselves! Michael KacMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue