Scope splitting in Syrian Arabic

Natural Language Semantics 30 (1):47-76 (2022)
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Abstract

Sentences like _Mary needs to make the fewest mistakes on the upcoming test_ have a ‘split scope’ reading roughly paraphrasable as ‘Mary exceeds all others in terms of how many mistakes she must _not_ make’; that is, her situation is the most precarious. The structural approach to this phenomenon attributes to such sentences a logical form resembling this paraphrase, in which the superlative component of the meaning of _fewest_ scopes above the modal _need to_ and the negative component scopes below it. This paper investigates analogous structures in Syrian Arabic, a language in which superlatives may appear at a distance from their scalar associates in the surface order. The syntax of such expressions in Syrian Arabic, and the range of interpretations available to the various syntactic permutations found there points to two different sources for split scope readings. While some split scope readings are derived by syntactic splitting of _fewest_ across a modal verb, others arise from a semantic ambiguity in the modal verb itself, rather than from a syntactic distinction in logical form.

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References found in this work

Logic and Conversation.H. Paul Grice - 1975 - In Donald Davidson (ed.), The logic of grammar. Encino, Calif.: Dickenson Pub. Co.. pp. 64-75.
Superlative expressions, context, and focus.Yael Sharvit & Penka Stateva - 2002 - Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (4):453-504.
Comparatives, superlatives, and resolution.Jean Mark Gawron - 1995 - Linguistics and Philosophy 18 (4):333 - 380.

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