Inverse Scope in Scrambling Languages: comparison with English

Abstract

The parent project is designed to explore how word order and determiner types influence the interpretation of sentences with two quantifiers in languages with scrambling. Two previous sub-experiments on Bangla, using picture-verification tasks, showed a significant interaction between word order and determiner type in the rendering of the scope readings. The current study is planned to compare the results obtained from Bangla using conditions with English sentences. This study differs from the Bangla sub-experiments in one major respect: namely the factor of word order. Since English does not have scrambling, we have kept the word order constant to the default SVO in experiment design. There is another minor difference from the previous Bangla experiments: determiner type. Instead of two universal determiners (sob 'all' and proti 'each' for Bangla), the present design involves manipulating three universal determiners of English: namely, 'each', 'every' and 'all of the'. We predict a strong effect of determiner type in rendering the IS readings, as the previous experimental work on English (Feiman and Snedeker 2016) have shown