Prohibiting Inverse Scope: An Experimental Study of Chinese vs. English

Abstract

Quantifier scope is an interface phenomenon that raises important questions concerning the processing of not only monolingual but also bilingual speakers. In this paper, we build upon the findings by Scontras et al. (to appear) by investigating and comparing the scope interpretations available for doubly quantified sentences such as Every shark attacked a pirate not only in Mandarin Chinese and English, but crucially in heritage Mandarin. Our results reinforce that (i) Mandarin does not exhibit inverse scope; and (ii) English exhibits inverse scope even when a quantifier is embedded in a relative clause, thus supporting the head-raising analysis of relativization (Vergnaud 1974, Kayne 1994). They also prove that (iii) heritage Mandarin does not demonstrate inverse scope, which conforms to the Processing Scope Economy principle (Anderson 2004).