Endriss Cornelia. Quantificational Topics: A Scopal Treatment of Exceptional Wide Scope Phenomena

Springer, 2009. — 310 p. — (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 86). — ISBN 904812302X, 9789048123025, 9789048123032.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.Information Structure
Topical Quantifiers
Topicality and Exceptional Wide Scope
An Outline of the Proposal
The Structure of this Book
Topicality
Defining Topicality
Aboutness
Familiarity
Topics as Entities
Indefinite Topics
Reinhart (1981)
Topic Tests and Topical Quantifiers
Simple Tests
Syntactic Marking
Intonational Marking
Morphological Marking
A Discourse Configurational Language: Hungarian
Alleged Topic TestsGenuine and Apparent Scope Readings
Specificity
Ioup (1977)
Hintikka (1986)
Enc¸ (1991)
Consequences
Wide Scope
Apparent Wide Scope
Apparent vs Genuine Wide Scope
Truth-Conditional Effects of Information Structure
Functional Readings
Data
Natural Functions
Properties of Natural Functions
Apparent vs Genuine Narrow ScopeExceptional Wide Scope
Scope Islands
The Class of Wide Scope Quantifiers
Genuine vs Apparent Exceptional Wide Scope
Approaches Relying on Speaker’s Reference
Fodor and Sag (1982)
Other Approaches
Problems
Approaches Relying on Domain Restriction
Schwarzschild (2002)
Other Approaches
Problems
Presuppositional Approaches
Yeom (1998)
Cresti (1995)
Other Approaches
Problems
Choice Function Approaches
Reinhart (1997); Winter (1997)
Kratzer (1998)
Problems
Consequences
Approaches Relying on Wide Extraction
DiscussionSemantic Effects of Topicality
Types of Aboutness Topics
Intonation
Topicality Induces Wide Scope
Genuine Wide Scope vs Apparent Wide Scope
Apparent Non-Wide Scope Interpretations of Direct
Aboutness Topics
Does a Strong Interpretation Imply Topicality?
Approaches Relating Exceptional Wide Scope to TopicalityExceptional Wide Scope as a Topic Phenomenon
Deriving the Classification
Technical Preliminaries
Quantifier Semantics
Structured Meanings
Components of the Theory
Creating a Topic Discourse Referent
The Topic Condition
Quantifier Classification
Topic Assert
Deriving Wide Scope via Topicality
Intermediate Scope Readings
Data
Analysis
Problems
Functional Topics
The Interpretation of Functional DPs
Topic Interpretation and the Topic Condition
with Functional DPsTechnicalities and Experiments
Generalized Quantifiers
Monotonicity
Witness Sets
Lexical Quantifier Semantics
Pilot Studies
The Accent Pattern of Wide Scope Indefinites
Wide Scope vs ‘Anti-Distributivity’