Syntax & Semantics Circle
University of California, Santa Cruz
fall 2013
November 22
Amy Rose Deal: "Some implications of Nez Perce relative clauses"
November 15
Adrian Brasoveanu: "What a Rational Interpreter Would Do: Building, Ranking, and Updating Quantifier Scope Representations in Discourse"
The talk will discuss the processing of sentence-internal same with four licensors (all, each, every and the) in two orders: licensor+same (surface scope) and same+licensor (inverse scope). We report the results of two self-paced reading studies showing that there is no general effect of surface vs. inverse scope, which we take as an argument for a model-oriented view of the processing cost of inverse scope: the inverse scope of quantifiers seems to be costly because of model structure reanalysis, not because of covert scope operations. The second result is methodological: the psycholinguistic investigation of semantic phenomena like the interaction of quantifiers and sentence-internal readings should always involve a context that prompts a deep enough processing of the target expressions. In one of our two studies, participants read the target sentences after reading a scenario introducing the two sets of entities the quantifier NP and the same NP referred to and they were asked to determine whether the sentence was true or false relative to the background scenario every time. In the other study, the participants read the same sentences without any context and there were fewer follow-up comprehension questions. The relevant effects observed in the study with contexts completely disappeared in the out-of-context study, although the participants in both studies were monitored for their level of attention to the experimental task.
November 1
In this meeting, we will discuss Chomsky's (2013) "Problems of Projection", as well as the reply by Carstens, Hornstein, & Seely (2013), "Head Movement in Problems of Projection".
October 25
Planning meeting for the 2013-2014 academic year.