The wide scope of German topical singular indefinites
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2023/14/0025/000619Keywords:
Information structure, Sentence topic, Indefinite wide scopeAbstract
Endriss (2009) postulates that indefinites take wide scope when they are marked as sentence topics. The present study aims to test this theory by using a forced-choice sentence continuation task. The results showed significant effects of sentence structure and intonation as independent topic-marking devices that make indefinite wide scope more available or even preferred in scopally ambiguous German sentences. With this study, I therefore provide empirical evidence highlighting the pragmatic influence of information structure on scope interpretation. In order to account for the observed graded scope preferences, I propose a reanalysis of the effect of topicality on scope disambiguation grounded in probabilistic language understanding.
References
Endriss, C. 2009. Quantificational Topics: A Scopal Treatment of Exceptional Wide Scope Phenomena. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. Springer.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
