Indefinites & Exceptional Scope
Overview
Indefinites can escape the boundaries of syntactic islands and ‘exceptionally’ project their existential force out of them. (1) admits a reading where there is one professor such that every student read the paper she wrote. To obtain such reading, the existential must take scope over the determiner phase which governs the relative clause. Note the different scope behavior in case of a universal quantifier (1b), where every must be interpreted narrowly.
- Every student read the paper that a famous professor wrote. $(\exists > \forall)$
- A student read the paper that every famous professor wrote. $(^{*}\forall > \exists)$
This problem has been examined in different ways, including referentialist (Fodor & Sag 1982), functional (Reinhart 1997; Kratzer 1998) and dynamic accounts (Charlow 2016). In this class, we will illustrate how dependence logics approaches (Brasoveanu & Farkas 2011) account for scope relationships and deal with cases like (1).