Publication details
Negace a skopus kvantifikátorů
| Title in English | Negation and the scope of quantifiers |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | There has been a lot of attention in the literature given to the factors which decide the relative scope of logical operators in the interpretation of sentences. One of the crucial factors was claimed to be information structure (Jackendoff 1972, Hajičová 1975, Buring 1997, a.o.). One of the most important cases discussed in the literature is the scopal interpretation of negative sentence containing universal quantifer which is assumed to be disambiguated by intonation pattern in English and German even by Kadmon (2001). We present an argument that the apparent wide scope of the universal quantifer over negation is a result of scope illusion as argued independently for defnite NPs and negation in Beck (2001). The crucial evidence comes from an extensive corpus study of the interpretation of Czech universal quantifer všechno 'all' (1000 sentences from the SYN2010, representative corpus of contemporary Czech, was parsed; the relative scope of negation and for each sentence was decided by paraphrasing the sentence meaning into the sentence with unambiguous scope and judging the plausibility of such paraphrase). |