The Pragmatics of Quantifier Scope: A Corpus Study

One of the most well-studied phenomena in natural language semantics has long been the question of what readings are possible in various types of sentences with multiple quantifiers. Semanticists have generally been concerned with developing theories to capture the range of possible readings for such sentences. This is what Higgins & Sadock (2003) have dubbed the problem of scope generation. To take a simple example like (1), then, the job of semantics is (i) to argue that the sentence is truly ambiguous, i.e., it has two possible readings depending on which quantifier ‘we think of first’ (the need to postulate ambiguity is not immediately obvious, particularly for example (1)), and (ii) to capture the ambiguity by providing adequate representations for those readings.