A student claims 'Every student read two papers' has only one meaning because 'every student' appears before 'two papers' in the sentence. What is wrong with this reasoning?
ANothing — surface word order does determine scope in English, and the first quantifier always takes wide scope
BScope is determined at Logical Form (LF), where quantifiers can covertly raise to positions that reflect their intended scope, regardless of surface order
CScope is determined by pragmatic context rather than any syntactic mechanism
DBoth quantifiers always take equal scope, so the sentence is always ambiguous regardless of word order
Surface word order does not determine scope. Quantifiers can undergo covert Quantifier Raising (QR) at Logical Form, moving to a position that reflects their scope. So even though 'every student' is linearly first, 'two papers' can raise to take wide scope, giving the reading where two specific papers are fixed and every student read those. The surface syntax is the same; the meanings differ. Processing evidence confirms both readings are genuinely available, though one is preferred.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
Consider 'Every professor recommended her own book.' What is the correct analysis of the pronoun 'her'?
A'Her' refers to a specific female mentioned earlier in the discourse
B'Her' is bound by 'every professor' — it covaries with whoever is the professor in each instance, ranging over the whole set
C'Her' cannot be bound by a universal quantifier; it must have a free referent
D'Her' is pragmatically resolved by the listener and has no grammatical binding relation to 'every professor'
This is a clear case of anaphoric binding: 'her' is a bound variable ranging over the same set as 'every professor.' Each professor recommended her own book — not someone else's. This bound reading is possible because 'every professor' c-commands 'her own book' in the syntactic structure. Binding requires this structural dominance relation, not just linear precedence. Option C is wrong: universal quantifiers standardly bind pronouns in their scope, and this is a textbook example.
Question 3 True / False
In 'Every student read two papers,' the reading where there exist two specific papers that every student read requires the existential quantifier 'two papers' to take wide scope over the universal 'every student.'
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
On the inverse scope reading (∃ > ∀), the sentence means: there exist two papers y such that for every student x, x read y. Here the papers are fixed — the same pair for all students. For this meaning, 'two papers' must have wide scope, taking the predicate 'λy. every student read y' as its argument. This requires covert Quantifier Raising of 'two papers' above 'every student' at LF. This is precisely what makes the sentence ambiguous: the surface form is identical, but the two LF representations yield logically distinct truth conditions.
Question 4 True / False
Binding is primarily determined by linear order: a pronoun can generally be bound by any quantificational expression that precedes it in the sentence.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Binding requires c-command — a structural dominance relation in the syntactic tree — not just linear precedence. In 'She recommended every professor's book,' the pronoun 'she' precedes 'every professor' but cannot be bound by it, because 'every professor' does not c-command the subject position where 'she' sits. The structural position matters, not the order. This shows that binding is a syntactic phenomenon reflecting tree structure, and scope-taking is subject to similar structural constraints.
Question 5 Short Answer
Why is quantifier scope described as a 'post-syntactic' phenomenon, and what is the mechanism that allows quantifiers to take scope in positions other than where they appear on the surface?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Scope is determined at Logical Form (LF), a level of syntactic representation distinct from the surface string. The mechanism is Quantifier Raising (QR): quantifiers can covertly move from their surface position to a higher node in the LF tree, leaving a trace that acts as a bound variable. This movement is 'covert' because it has no effect on pronunciation — the surface string is unchanged. The scope of a quantifier is then determined by where it lands at LF, not where it appears on the surface, which is why a quantifier that follows another on the surface can nonetheless take wide scope.
The post-syntactic framing captures that scope is not readable off the phonological form of the sentence. Two sentences with identical surface syntax can differ in meaning because their LF representations — after QR — are different. This also explains why scope ambiguities are real: both LF representations are grammatically well-formed derivations from the same surface string, and both are computed during comprehension. Processing asymmetries (inverse scope being harder) reflect the cost of constructing the non-surface-faithful LF.