Scopal Independence: On Branching & Wide Scope Readings of Indefinites & Disjunctions1

Hintikka claimed in the 1970s that indefinites and disjunctions give rise to 'branching readings' that can only be handled by a 'game-theoretic' semantics as expressive as a logic with quantification over Skolem functions. Due to empirical and methodological difficulties, the issue was left unresolved in the linguistics literature. Independently, however, it was discovered in the 1980s that, contrary to other quantifiers, indefinites may scope out of syntactic islands. We claim that (i) branching readings and the island-escaping behavior of indefinites are two sides of the same coin: when the latter problem is considered in full generality, a mechanism of 'functional quantification' (Winter 1998, 2003) must be postulated which is strictly more expressive than Hintikka's, and predicts that his branching readings are indeed real, although his own solution was insufficiently general. Furthermore, (ii) we show that, as Hintikka had seen, disjunctions share the behavior of indefinites, both with respect to island-escaping behavior and (probably) branching readings. The functional analysis can thus naturally be extended to them. Finally, (iii) we suggest that the functional analysis can and should be reinterpreted in terms of a mechanism of double quantification, according to which an indefinite may contribute (a) an existential quantifier which has narrow scope, but which (b) includes in its restrictor a definite description over identifying properties, i.e. properties which, given a certain number of individual arguments, hold true of exactly one object. The resulting theory is higher-order, like the Skolem analysis; it involves restrictors that hold true of exactly one individual, like the 'singleton restrictor' analysis (Schwarzschild 2002); and it accounts for the island-escaping behavior by way of presupposition accommodation, like the 'accommodation analysis'. We explain in this way: (i) why 'specific indefinites' often appear to be referential (when no accommodation occurs); (ii) why they preferably -but not systematicallyhave wide scope existential force when accommodation is necessary; (iii) why wide scope existential force is compatible with diagnostics that suggest that something has narrow scope existential force (as in: If there is a certain friend of yours at the party, I'll leave right away.) Finally, (iv) given independently motivated pragmatic constraints, we explain why modified numerals normally do not escape islands, and we predict some exceptional cases in which they do.