Scope and Constituency

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Linguistic Inquiry. A quantifier A has scope over a quantifier B in case A c-commands a member of the chain containing B. We start by contrasting the behavior of QPs in English and Chinese (section 1). Chinese sentences like (lab), contrary to the corresponding English sentences like (2), are not ambiguous. The subject QP must have scope over the object QP. (The QPs that may have wide scope are italicized.) (1) a. Meigeren dou xihuan yige nuren. everyone all like one woman 'Everyone loves a woman.' b. Yaoshi liangge ren zhaodao meige xiansuo. if two men found every clue 'If two men found every clue ...' (2) Someone loves everyone. the LI reviewers, and in particular James Huang for insightful comments. 1 Chinese does not have an expression like someone. The expressions that are closest to someone are bare NPs or mogeren 'a certain person' or you (yi)ge ren 'there is a person'. In fact, Chinese generally does not allow an indefinite NP in subject position unless a modal occurs in the sentence, or the subject is preceded by you 'have, exist' (see Hudson (1986) and Lee (1986) for accounts of such phenomena), or the clause containing such a subject is an if-clause: (i) a. *Sange ren lai le. three men come Asp b. Sange ren hui lai. three men will come c. You sange ren lai le. have three men come Asp There existed three men that came.' d. Yaoshi sange ren lai ... if three men came The essence of this IP plus restructuring account is that restructuring nullifies the effect of the IP in English but is prohibited by the phrase structure rules in Chinese. The lack of such restructuring in Chinese makes this language display the IP effect in all cases. On the surface, then, English does not exhibit the IP effect but Chinese does.2 However, there are instances in English that seem to exhibit an IP effect and instances in Chinese that do not (see note 2 for clarifications of this statement). …