22 - The syntax of scopeand quantification

Summary

The initial breakthrough in our understanding of natural language quantification came with Frege's insight that quantifiers are operators prefixed to an open sentence. The study of quantification within the generative syntactic tradition since Montague can be characterized as a search for principled ways of regulating scopal dependencies and interactions. This chapter focuses on quantified noun phrases and wh expressions. It discusses the phenomena of quantifier split and quantifier float, showing how the challenges posed by syntactic deviations from the normal form of quantification. The chapter also deals with the wh-scope marking and wh-copy constructions, illustrating their special properties by comparing them to regular wh-extraction. Thornton and Crain report an acquisition study that provides interesting corroboration of the division between wh-scope marking and wh-copying constructions. Much of the work in the domain of long-distance wh-dependency has focused on the nature of quantification involved.