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Prosodic disambiguation of scopally ambiguous quantificational sentences in a discourse context1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2014

KRISTEN SYRETT ,
GEORGIA SIMON  and
KIRSTEN NISULA
KRISTEN SYRETT*
Affiliation:
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick
GEORGIA SIMON
Affiliation:
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick
KIRSTEN NISULA
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
*
Authors' address: (Syrett) Department of Linguistics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick, 18 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

Researchers have long sought to determine the strength of the relation between prosody and the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences in English involving quantification and negation (e.g. All the men didn't go). While Jackendoff (1972) proposed a one-to-one mapping between sentence-final contour and the scope of negation (falling contour: narrow scope, fall-rise contour: wide scope), in subsequent work, researchers (e.g. Ladd 1980; Ward & Hirschberg 1985; Kadmon & Roberts 1986) disentangled the link between prosody and scope. Even though these pragmatic accounts predict variability in production, they still allow for some correlation between scope and prosody. To date, we lack systematic evidence to bear on this discussion. Here, we present findings from two perception experiments aimed at investigating whether prosodic information – including, but not limited to, sentence-final contour – can successfully disambiguate such sentences. We show that when speakers provide consistent auditory cues to sentential interpretation, hearers can successfully recruit these cues to arrive at the correct interpretation as intended by the speaker. In light of these results, we argue that psycholinguistic studies (including language acquisition studies) investigating participants’ ability to access multiple interpretations of scopally ambiguous sentences – quantificational and otherwise – should carefully control for prosody.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , July 2014 , pp. 453 - 493
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[1]

We gratefully acknowledge a Rutgers University startup grant to K. Syrett and a research grant from the Aresty Research Center at Rutgers University. This work benefitted from technical support from the Rutgers Phonology and Field Research Laboratory, discussions with Shigeto Kawahara, contributions from Stephen Klimashousky, and helpful feedback from three anonymous Journal of Linguistics reviewers. We thank audiences at ETAP 2 (2011), NELS 43 (2012), and The University of Pennsylvania for their helpful comments and observations.

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