Home Pragmatics in the interpretation of scope ambiguities
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Pragmatics in the interpretation of scope ambiguities

  • Valentina Apresjan

    Valentina Apresjan was educated at the Moscow State University (philological faculty, 1987–1991) and University of Southern California (Ph.D in Linguistics, 1991–1996). She taught at Dartmouth College (2010–2018) and is currently Associate Professor of Linguistics at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (Moscow). Her research interests include semantics, cross-cultural pragmatics, and pragmatics of constructions.

    EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 23, 2019
Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus study of pragmatic factors involved in interpreting potentially ambiguous sentences with negation and universal quantifiers, as demonstrated by the Russian sentence Oni ne uspejut vsjo eto sdelat’ ‘They won’t have time to do all this.’ Ambiguity in such sentences results from potential differences in scope assignment. If negation scopes over the quantifier, we get the interpretation of partial negation: ‘They will manage to do some of these things, but not everything.’ If negation scopes over the verb, we get total negation: ‘They won’t manage to do anything.’

This study is based on Russian and English data extracted from a variety of corpora. We demonstrate that while syntactic conditions where scope ambiguity is possible are different for Russian and English, in situations when both languages allow it, speakers rely on the same pragmatic mechanisms for disambiguation that are based on Gricean cooperation principle and shared background knowledge. Disambiguation is facilitated by lexical markers, different for verb-negated and quantifier-negated readings, and similar in Russian and English. We show that the interpretation of the quantifier is pragmatically different for verb-negated and quantifier-negated readings (emphatic in the former case and quantificational in the latter), and lexical markers of each reading are semantically and pragmatically consistent with this difference. Namely, verb-negated readings occur primarily in the context of demonstrative pronouns in their pragmaticalized meaning of negative assessment and negatively connoted nouns, while quantifier-negated readings occur in the context of verbs with quantitative semantics and quantitative implicatures that consolidate the interpretation of quantification.

Award Identifier / Grant number: 18–01–0007

Funding statement: The publication was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2018–2019 (grant №_18–01–0007 Factors in resolving scope ambiguity) and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5–100”.

About the author

Valentina Apresjan

Valentina Apresjan was educated at the Moscow State University (philological faculty, 1987–1991) and University of Southern California (Ph.D in Linguistics, 1991–1996). She taught at Dartmouth College (2010–2018) and is currently Associate Professor of Linguistics at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (Moscow). Her research interests include semantics, cross-cultural pragmatics, and pragmatics of constructions.

References

Aoun, Joseph & Yen-hui Audrey Li. 1989. Scope and constituency. Linguistic Inquiry 20(2). 141–172.Search in Google Scholar

Apresjan, Yury. 1974. Eksperimental’noe issledovanie semantiki russkogo glagola. Moscow: Nauka.Search in Google Scholar

Apresjan, Yury. 1995. Selected works [Izbrannye trudy]. vol. 2. Moscow: Shkola “Jazyki russkoj kul’tury”.Search in Google Scholar

Babby, Leonard. 1980. Existential sentences and negation in Russian. Ann Arbor: Caroma Publishers.Search in Google Scholar

Babby, Leonard, H. 2001. The genitive of negation: A unified analysis. In Steven Franks, Tracy Holloway King & Michael Yadroff (eds.), Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Bloomington Meeting 2000 (FASL 9), 39–55. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.Search in Google Scholar

Barentsen, Adriaan, А. 2014. Problemy opisanija sojuza poka. [Problems of the Description of the connective poka.]. Die Welt der Slaven 55. 377–410.Search in Google Scholar

Boguslavskij, Igor. 1998. The scope of commencing and information structure: Retracting the rheme [Sfera dejstvija nachinatel’nosti i aktual’noe chlenenie: Vtjagivanie remy]. In Kritika I Semiotika 36. 8–18.Search in Google Scholar

Boguslavsky, Igor. 1985. Research in the semantics of syntax [Issledovanija po sintaksicheskoj semantike]. Moscow: Nauka.Search in Google Scholar

Boguslavsky, Igor. 1990. External and internal scope of certain temporal modifiers [Vneshnjaja i vnutrennjaja sfera dejsvtija nekotoryh temporal’nyh obstojatel’stv]. In Zygmunt Saloni (ed.), Metody formalne w opisie językow słowiańskich, 137–148. Białystok: Dzial Wydawn.Search in Google Scholar

Boguslavsky, Igor. 1996. Sfera dejstvija leksicheskix edinic [Scope of lexical items]. Moscow: Shkola “Jazyki russkoj kul’tury”.Search in Google Scholar

Boguslavsky, Igor. 2001. Modality, comparison and negation [Modal’nost’, sravnitel’nost’ i otricanie]]. Russian Language in Scientific Light [Russkij Jazyk v nauchnom osveshhenii] 1. 27–51.Search in Google Scholar

Brown, Sue. 1999. The syntax of negation in Russian. A minimalist approach. Stanford: CSLI. Publications. Stanford Monographs in Linguistics.Search in Google Scholar

Chvany, Catherine V. 1975. On the Syntax of Be-Sentences in Russian. Cambridge: Slavica Publishers.Search in Google Scholar

Cooper, Robin. 1979. Variable binding and relative clauses. In F. Guenthner & S.J. Schmidt (eds.), Formal semantics and pragmatics for natural languages, 131–169. Dordrecht: Reidel.10.1007/978-94-009-9775-2_5Search in Google Scholar

de Swart, Henriëtte. 1998. Licensing of negative polarity items under inverse scope. Lingua 105. 175–200.10.1016/S0024-3841(98)00021-7Search in Google Scholar

Diewald, Gabriele. 2011. Pragmaticalization (defined) as grammaticalization of discourse functions. Linguistics 49(2). 365–390.10.1515/ling.2011.011Search in Google Scholar

Dobrovol’skij, Dmitry & A(nna Zaliznjak. 2018. German constructions with modal verbs and their Russian correlates: A project of a corpus [Nemeckie konstrukcii s modal’nymi glagolami i ih russkie sootvetstvija: Proekt nadkorpusnoj bazy dannyh]. In Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies 17. 172–184.Search in Google Scholar

Gil, David. 1982. Quantifier scope, linguistic variation, and natural language semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 5. 421–472.10.1007/BF00355582Search in Google Scholar

Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268511.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, 3: Speech acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004368811_003Search in Google Scholar

Gyuris, Beáta. 2009. The semantics and pragmatics of the contrastive topic in Hungarian. Budapest: Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences & Lexica.Search in Google Scholar

Hajičova, Eva. 1998. Topic-focus articulation, tripartite structures and semantic content. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-015-9012-9Search in Google Scholar

Hintikka, Jaakko. 1973. Quantifiers vs. quantification theory. Dialectica 27. 329–358. Reprinted in Linguistic Inquiry 5 (1974):153–177.10.1111/j.1746-8361.1973.tb00624.xSearch in Google Scholar

Horn, Laurence. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar

Hurum, S. 1988. Handling scope ambiguities in English. In ANLC ‘88 Proceedings of the second conference on applied natural language processing. 58–65.10.3115/974235.974246Search in Google Scholar

Ionin, Tania. 2010. The scope of indefinites: An experimental investigation. Natural Language Semantics 18(3). 295–350.10.1007/s11050-010-9057-3Search in Google Scholar

Jack, G.B. 1977. Negation in later Middle English prose. Archivum Linguisticum 9. 58–72.Search in Google Scholar

Jackendoff, Ray. 1969. An interpretive theory of negation. Foundations of Language 5. 218–241.Search in Google Scholar

Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The philosophy of grammar. London: Allen & Unwin.Search in Google Scholar

Jespersen, Otto. 1940. A modern English grammar on historical principles. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.Search in Google Scholar

Kiss, K. É. 2006. Quantifier scope ambiguities. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (eds.), The blackwell companion to syntax. New Jersey, Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.10.1002/9780470996591.ch53Search in Google Scholar

Klima, Ed. 1964. Negation in English. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (eds.), The structure of language, 246–323.Search in Google Scholar

Koizumi, Y. 2009. Processing the not-because ambiguity in English: The role of pragmatics and prosody. CUNY: Unpublished thesis.Search in Google Scholar

Kurtzman, H. S. & M. C. MacDonald. 1993. Resolution of quantifier scope ambiguities. Cognition 48. 243–279.10.1016/0010-0277(93)90042-TSearch in Google Scholar

Paducheva, Elena. 1974. On the semantics of syntax. Materials for the transformational grammar of Russian [O semantike sintaksisa. Materialy k transformacionnoj grammatike russkogo yazyka]. Moscow: Nauka.Search in Google Scholar

Paducheva, Elena. 2005. Effects of suspended assertion: Global negation. [Effekty snyatoj utverditel’nosti: Global’noe otricanie]. In the Russian Language in a Scientific Light [russkij Yazyk V Nauchnom Osveshchenii] 2(10). 17–42.Search in Google Scholar

Paducheva, Elena. 2011. Russian negative sentence [Russkoe otricatel’noe predlozhenie]. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury.Search in Google Scholar

Partee, Barbara H. 1991. Topic, focus and quantification. In Steven Moore & Adam Zachary Wyner (eds.), SALT I: Proceedings of the first annual conference on semantics and linguistic theory 1991, 159–187. Ithaca, N.Y.: CLC Publications, Department of Linguistics, Cornell University.10.3765/salt.v1i0.2918Search in Google Scholar

Partee, Barbara H. 1993. On the ‘scope of negation’ and polarity sensitivity. In Eva Hajicova (ed.) Prague, November 24–27, 1992, Functional description of language: Proceedings of the conference, 179–196. Prague: Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University.Search in Google Scholar

Poesio, Massimo. 1993. Assigning a semantic scope to operators. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1993. 78–86.10.3115/981574.981585Search in Google Scholar

Reinhart, Tanya. 1997. Quantifier scope: How labour is divided between QR and choice functions. In Linguistics and Philosophy 20. 335–397.10.1023/A:1005349801431Search in Google Scholar

Rudnitskaya, Elena. 1993. Sentencialnye narechija v russkom jazyke. PhD dissertation.Search in Google Scholar

Sgall, P., E. Hajičová & E. Benesová. 1973. Topic, focus and generative semantics. Kronberg, Taunus: Scriptor.Search in Google Scholar

Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Th. Gries Stefan. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2). 209–243.10.1075/ijcl.8.2.03steSearch in Google Scholar

Syrett, K., G. Simon & K. Nisula. 2014. Prosodic disambiguation of scopally ambiguous quantificational sentences in a discourse context. Journal of Linguistics 50(2). 453–493.10.1017/S0022226714000012Search in Google Scholar

Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Tottie, G. & A. Neukom-Hermann. 2010. Quantifier-negation interaction in English: A corpus linguistic study of all…not constructions. In L. R Horn, The expression of negation, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton. 149–185.10.1515/9783110219302.149Search in Google Scholar

Tunstall, Susanne Lynn. 1998. The interpretation of quantifiers: Semantics and processing. Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9909228. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9909228.Search in Google Scholar

Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. The Philosophical Review 66(2). 143–160.10.2307/2182371Search in Google Scholar

Vendryès, Joseph. 1950. Sur la nègation abusive. Bulletin De La Société De Linguistique De Paris 46. 1–18.Search in Google Scholar

Zaliznjak, Anna. 2006. Polysemy in language and its representation [Mnogoznachnost’ v jazyke i sposoby ee predstavlenija]. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskih kul’tur.Search in Google Scholar

Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2004. Sentential negation and negative concord. Utrecht: LOT.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2019-08-23
Published in Print: 2019-08-27

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 13.10.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ip-2019-0022/html
Scroll to top button