An experimental investigation into scope rigidity in written Mandarin.

ABSTRACT: Mandarin Chinese is claimed to be a scope-rigid language, as its doubly-quantified simple transitive sentences are unambiguous with surface scope only and no inverse scope available. However, it has been debated whether Mandarin Chinese allows inverse scope in some syntactic environments other than simple transitives. This paper investigates whether scope rigidity as a property of the grammar of Mandarin prevents scope ambiguity in different syntactic environments and what factors influence scope interpretations. Using a Truth-Value Judgment task, we tested the judgments of 98 Mandarin Chinese native speakers on transitive sentences containing both a subject and object quantifier under adverbial clauses. The results show that inverse scope reading is considered available for doubly-quantif

SUBMITTER: Wu H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10289302 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature