Title
All split scope is not alike

Luisa Martí and Klaus Abels

Guest lecture

Date:  22.05.2008

Time:  12:15

Venue:  E0103

Description
Negative indefinites (i.e., words like "nobody" in English) in languages like German give rise to split scope readings across intensional verbs and also across universal quantifiers. Both types are usually thought to constitute one and the same phenomenon (Jacobs 1980, Geurts 1996, de Swart 2000, Rullman 1995, Penka 2007). Analyses of split scope thus usually propose a single mechanism to derive the relevant readings (ambiguity of negative indefinites, as in Geurts or de Swart; amalgamation or some other process that puts together sentential negation and existential determiners, as in Jacobs or Rullman; agreement between an abstract negative operator and the negative morphology of negative indefinites, as in Penka). In this talk we show that the two types have less in common than previously thought. So we argue that there is something wrong in all of these analyses. The argument is partly based on new observations concerning the (un)availability of split scope with bound pronouns . We propose an analysis of split scope with intensional verbs in the spirit of Hackl's (2001) and Heim's (2001) decompositional analysis of comparative quantifiers and Kratzer's (1998) analysis of pseudoscope with choice functions. Since there are a number of unresolved empirical questions concerning split scope with universal quantifiers, we leave its analysis for another time.