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Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many
years, this book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope
behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to
exceptional wide scope phenomena. Its unique approach offers an explanation
for the fact that it is only a proper subset of the indefinites that shows
this exceptional wide scope behaviour.
The author draws a careful distinction between genuine and apparent scope
readings, a distinction that is usually not taken care of and has thus led
to certain confusions. In particular, it is argued that functional readings
have to be kept strictly apart from non-functional ones and that all
proposals that use functional mechanisms to explain the phenomena at hand
face severe problems.
The existing body of literature on the main issues of the book is
thoroughly reviewed. This makes the book well suited as background
literature for graduate seminars on those topics.
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