Focus on Russian Scope: An Experimental Investigation of the Relationship between Quantifier Scope, Prosody, and Information Structure

Focus on Russian Scope: An Experimental Investigation of the Relationship between Quantifier Scope, Prosody, and Information Structure
Tania Ionin, Tatiana Luchkina
October 2017

This paper reports on an experimental investigation of quantifier scope in Russian SVO and OVS sentences. The factors of word order, prosody, information structure and indefinite form are manipulated experimentally. It is shown that native Russian speakers have a preference for surface scope under neutral prosody, though this preference is more pronounced with one indefinites than with two indefinites. It is furthermore found that contrastive focus on the fronted object QP in OVS order facilitates the inverse-scope reading, but that contrastive focus on the subject in SVO order does not. These findings have implications for the syntactic analysis of non-canonical word order in Russian (Bailyn 2011, Slioussar 2013), and support the link between contrastive focus and scope reconstruction in Russian (Ionin 2003, Neeleman and Titov 2009).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003818 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Linguistic Inquiry (to appear)
keywords:	contrast, focus, indefinite, information structure, russian, scope, topic, semantics, syntax
Downloaded:	565 times

[ edit this article | back to article list ]