CNL Lunch Talks

Takuya Goro, Utako Minai, Tomo Fujii

The anti-reconstruction effect and the acquisition of scope ambiguities

Thursday September 15th 2005, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

A sentence with two scope-bearing elements (e.g. ""every boy" and "not", etc) is occasionally associated with two different readings (i.e. scope ambiguity). The phenomenon called the anti-reconstruction effect is one of the cases where scope ambiguity we might expect to hold does not obtain. The following English sentence, which involves an infinitival complement, is ambiguous between two readings:

(1) Mary forgot [to close all the windows]

It means either (i) all the windows are such that Mary forget to close them (all>not; wide scope reading of "all") or that (ii) what Mary forgot to do is to close all the windows (not>all; narrow scope reading of "all"). However, some languages including German and Japanese have a very similar infinitival/non-finite complement construction where "forget" cannot scope over the universal quantifier. In adult Japanese, the sentence in (2) below lacks the narrow reading of "all the windows", which contrasts with (1) from English.

(2) Mary-ga [mado-o subete sime]-wasure-ta

"Mary-NOM [window-ACC all close]-forget-PAST"

(2) always means that for all the windows, Mary forgot to close them (all>not). Put another way, the universal quantifier that is thematically associated with the complement predicate must take higher scope than the matrix predicate "forget". In this talk, we will discuss three things. First, we will examine the nature of the effect. Some syntactic and semantic observations suggest that the difference between (1) and (2) is structural. Second, we will discuss what kind of problem the lack of ambiguity in question poses for language acquisition. Finally, we will report the results of an experiment we conducted with Japanese speaking children, which investigated how Japanese children behave with respect to the restriction on scope interpretation under consideration.