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Inverse Scope in Scrambling Languages: comparison with English
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Description: Sentences with two scopally interacting quantifiers are ambiguous between a Surface Scope (SS) and an Inverse Scope (IS) reading. Results from experimental studies show that, when presented with such sentences, English speakers tend to favor the SS over the IS reading. Scrambling languages like Bengali have been claimed to show more extreme examples of this preference: speakers of these languages generally favor the reading that is transparently conveyed by the word order of the sentence, expressing scope reversal preferentially by changing the surface order of the quantifiers. Alongside this cross-linguistic preference for surface scope, scope preferences have also been found to vary as a function of the type of quantifiers involved. In English, for instance, the quantifiers each and every tend to take widescope over other quantifiers whereas all doesn’t. How do these two factors affecting scope interpretation, namely, word order and scope preference, interact with each other? In this article, we report on two sets of experiments investigating the extent to which word order, and scrambling in particular modulates speakers’ scope interpretation of universal quantifiers, comparing English to Bengali. Results of these studies show that scope preferences are affected by the type of universal quantifier in a similar way in both languages, irrespective of word order.