In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not. Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations.
One of the major concerns of research in formal semantics is the relationship between operators' syntactic positions and their semantic scope. This relationship is not transparent, since the scope of an operator need not directly correspond to its surface position and a single surface form can be semantically ambiguous between different scope construals. Some theories of scope posit a level of syntactic structure called logical form, in which an item's syntactic position corresponds to its semantic scope. Others theories compute scope relations in the semantics itself, using formal tools such as type shifters, monads, and continuations.
Phenomena
Scope ambiguity
The scope of an operator need not correspond directly to the word order of the sentence it occurs in. For instance, some sentences display a scope ambiguity in that the relative scopes of two operators can be construed in multiple ways.
- Every hedgehog is friends with a giraffe.
This sentence can be understood in two ways. On the inverse scope reading, there is a single giraffe who is very popular in the hedgehog community. On the surface scope reading, the sentence can be true even if the hedgehogs are friends with different giraffes.
Split scope
Split scope is the phenomenon where different components of an expressions item's meaning take scope in different places. Negative quantifiers are one category of expression which have been argued to take split scope.
- The company need fire no employees.
On the de re (non-split) reading, this sentence means that there is no employee such that the company needs to fire that employee. This is a non-split scope reading since "no" simply takes scope above the modal "need". On the split scope reading of this sentence, it means that it is not the case that the company needs to fire any employees. On this reading, "no" decomposes into a negation scoping above "need" and an existential quantifier scoping below it.
Indefinites have been argued to have split scope, having separate existential scope and distributive scope. This fact can be seen in the following example:
- If three relatives of mine die, I will inherit a house.
Among this sentence's reading is one which means "There exists a set of three relatives such that, if those three relatives die, I will inherit a house." On this reading, the indefinite "three relatives of mine" takes existential scope outside the conditional–– it asserts unconditionally that those three relatives do in fact exist. However, if the indefinite takes distributive scope inside the conditional–– the speaker will inherit a house if three relatives die, not if x dies where x can be any of those three relatives.
Definite descriptions have also been argued to have split scope. Definites are classically considered to presuppose that their referents are unique. For instance, the definite description "the cat" is infelicitous in a context where there are multiple cats which the speaker could have in mind. However, this generalization seems to be contradicted by Haddock descriptions such as the following:
- Context: In front of the speaker are numerous hats, one of which contains a rabbit.
Haddock description: The rabbit in the hat
This noun phrase is felicitous to use in this context, even though there is no unique hat. What seems to license this surprising use of the definite description is the fact that the context contains a unique rabbit-containing hat. To cash out this idea, it has been proposed that the uniqueness presupposition of "the hat" takes scope separately from the rest of the definite's meaning. In other words, a witness set is established low in the structure, but is checked for singletonness higher up.
Scope islands
While operators can often take scope above their surface position, there are not entirely free to take scope wherever they want. For instance, as illustrated by Sentence 1 below, quantifiers that originate inside an if-clause usually cannot take scope outside of that "if"-clause. This sentence cannot mean that Beth will inherit one house for each dead relative.
- If every relative of mine dies, I will inherit a house.
This fact parallels the fact that a wh-phrase cannot be extracted from an "if"-clause, as shown in Sentence 2.
- Which relativei will you inherit a fortune if ti dies?
Examples of this sort have been used to argue that scope relations are determined by syntactic movement operations.
Aside from their theoretical significance, scope islands are also practically useful since they can be used to construct unambiguous paraphrases of sentences with scope ambiguities.
Exceptional scope
While most operators are unable to scope out of an island, others can. For instance, the indefinite "a" in the sentence below can take scope outside of its surface position inside an "if"-clause. This sentence can mean that there is a particular relative who must die for the speaker to get a house.
- If a relative of mine dies, I will inherit a house.
Examples of this sort have been used to argue that indefinites do not have standard generalized quantifier denotations. On the choice function approach proposed by Tanya Reinhart, indefinites contribute a variable over choice functions which can be existentially closed at any point higher in the structure.Angelika Kratzer proposed another choice function-based theory, which is similar to Reinhart's except that the choice function variable is left free. Recent work such as Charlow (2020) treats indefinites as denoting sets of individuals which can be type shifted so that they take scope in a manner similar to Karttunen's (1977) alternative-based mechanism for wh-questions.
Formal approaches to scope
The structural view of scope is one influential view which posits a close relationship between syntax and semantics. This approach is characterized by the following hypothesis, first formulated by Tanya Reinhart:
- Hypothesis about scope and domain: The semantic scope of an operator corresponds to the position of the item which expresses it at some level of syntactic representation.
This view is widely adopted in generative approaches such as that of Heim and Kratzer (1998). In these approaches, the relevant syntactic level is logical form and the syntactic notion which corresponds to semantic scope is typically identified as c-command.
In structural approaches, discrepancies between an expression's surface position and its semantic scope are explained by syntactic movement operations such as quantifier raising. The movement approach is motivated in large part by the fact that quantifier scope seems to obey many of the same restrictions that movement does, e.g. islands.
One prominent alternative to the structural view is the type shifting view first proposed by Barbara Partee and Mats Rooth. This approach uses type shifters to govern scopal relations. Since type shifters are applied during the process of semantic interpretation, this approach allows scopal relations to be partly independent of syntactic structure. The type shifting approach serves as the basis of many recent proposals for exceptional scope, split scope, and other troublesome scope-related phenomena.
See also
- Continuation-passing style
- De dicto and de re
- Generalized quantifier
- Logical form (linguistics)
- Quantifier (linguistics)
- Type shifter
References
- Heim, Irene; Kratzer, Angelika (1998). Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 194–198.
- Ruys, Eddy; Winter, Yoad (2011). "Quantifier scope in formal linguistics." (PDF). In Gabbay, Dov; Guenthner, Franz (eds.). Handbook of Philosophical Logic (2 ed.). Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 159–225. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-0479-4_3. ISBN 978-94-007-0478-7.
- Potts, Chris (2000). "When even no's Neg is splitsville". Jorge Hankamer WebFest. University of California, Santa Cruz Linguistic Department. Retrieved 30 August 2020.
- Barker, Chris (2015). "Scope" (PDF). In Lappin, Shalom; Fox, Chris (eds.). Handbook of Contemporary Semantics (2 ed.). Wiley Blackwell. Section 4.3. doi:10.1002/9781118882139.ch2. ISBN 9781118882139.
- Szabolcsi, Anna (2010). Quantification. Cambridge University Press. p. 92.
- Eddy, Ruys (1992). The scope of indefinites (PhD). Utrecht University.
- Bumford, Dylan (2017). "Split-scope definites: Relative superlatives and Haddock descriptions" (PDF). Linguistics and Philosophy. 40 (6): 549–593. doi:10.1007/s10988-017-9210-2. S2CID 254742178.
- Haddock, Nicholas (1987). "Incremental interpretation and Combinatory Categorial Grammar". Proceedings of The 10th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The 10th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Vol. 2. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.
- Ruys, Eddy; Winter, Yoad (2011). "Quantifier scope in formal linguistics." (PDF). In Gabbay, Dov; Guenthner, Franz (eds.). Handbook of Philosophical Logic (2 ed.). Dordrecht: Springer. Section 3.2. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-0479-4_3. ISBN 978-94-007-0478-7.
- Barker, Chris (2015). "Scope" (PDF). In Lappin, Shalom; Fox, Chris (eds.). Handbook of Contemporary Semantics (2 ed.). Wiley Blackwell. Section 1.6. doi:10.1002/9781118882139.ch2. ISBN 9781118882139.
- Barker, Chris (2015). "Scope" (PDF). In Lappin, Shalom; Fox, Chris (eds.). Handbook of Contemporary Semantics (2 ed.). Wiley Blackwell. Section 5. doi:10.1002/9781118882139.ch2. ISBN 9781118882139.
- Reinhart, Tanya (1997). "Quantifier scope: How labor is divided between QR and choice functions". Linguistics and Philosophy. 20 (4): 335–397. doi:10.1023/A:1005349801431. S2CID 58351641.
- Kratzer, Angelika (1998). "Scope or pseudoscope? Are there wide-scope indefinites?". In Rothstein, Susan (ed.). Events and grammar. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. Vol. 70. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 163–196. doi:10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_8. ISBN 978-1-4020-0289-2.
- Charlow, Simon (2020). "The scope of alternatives: Indefiniteness and islands". Linguistics and Philosophy. 43 (3): 427–472. doi:10.1007/s10988-019-09278-3. S2CID 254749307.
- Karttunen, Lauri (1977). "Syntax and semantics of questions". Linguistics and Philosophy. 1 (1): 3–44. doi:10.1007/BF00351935. S2CID 64174420.
- Szabolcsi, Anna (2010). Quantification. Cambridge University Press.
- Reinhart, Tanya (1979). "Syntactic domains for semantic rules". In Günthner, Franz; Schmidt, J.S. (eds.). Formal Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Languages. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. ISBN 978-90-277-0778-9.
- Heim, Irene; Kratzer, Angelika (1998). Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 184–188.
- Ruys, Eddy; Winter, Yoad (2011). "Quantifier scope in formal linguistics." (PDF). In Gabbay, Dov; Guenthner, Franz (eds.). Handbook of Philosophical Logic (2 ed.). Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 159–225. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-0479-4_3. ISBN 978-94-007-0478-7.
- Barker, Chris (2015). "Scope" (PDF). In Lappin, Shalom; Fox, Chris (eds.). Handbook of Contemporary Semantics (2 ed.). Wiley Blackwell. pp. 40–76. doi:10.1002/9781118882139.ch2. ISBN 9781118882139.
- Partee, Barbara; Rooth, Mats (1983). "Generalized conjunction and type ambiguity". In von Stechow, Arnim; Schwarze, Christoph; Bauerle, Rainer (eds.). Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language. Berlin: de Gruyter. pp. 334–356. doi:10.1002/9780470758335.ch14. ISBN 9780470758335.
- Partee, Barbara (1986). "Noun phrase interpretation and type-shifting principles" (PDF). In Groenendijk, Jeroen; de Jong, Dick; Stokhof, Martin (eds.). Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers. Dordrecht: Foris. ISBN 9067652679. S2CID 96440512. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-02-11.
In formal semantics the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies For instance in the sentence Paulina doesn t drink beer but she does drink wine the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations One of the major concerns of research in formal semantics is the relationship between operators syntactic positions and their semantic scope This relationship is not transparent since the scope of an operator need not directly correspond to its surface position and a single surface form can be semantically ambiguous between different scope construals Some theories of scope posit a level of syntactic structure called logical form in which an item s syntactic position corresponds to its semantic scope Others theories compute scope relations in the semantics itself using formal tools such as type shifters monads and continuations PhenomenaScope ambiguity The scope of an operator need not correspond directly to the word order of the sentence it occurs in For instance some sentences display a scope ambiguity in that the relative scopes of two operators can be construed in multiple ways Every hedgehog is friends with a giraffe This sentence can be understood in two ways On the inverse scope reading there is a single giraffe who is very popular in the hedgehog community On the surface scope reading the sentence can be true even if the hedgehogs are friends with different giraffes Split scope Split scope is the phenomenon where different components of an expressions item s meaning take scope in different places Negative quantifiers are one category of expression which have been argued to take split scope The company need fire no employees On the de re non split reading this sentence means that there is no employee such that the company needs to fire that employee This is a non split scope reading since no simply takes scope above the modal need On the split scope reading of this sentence it means that it is not the case that the company needs to fire any employees On this reading no decomposes into a negation scoping above need and an existential quantifier scoping below it Indefinites have been argued to have split scope having separate existential scope and distributive scope This fact can be seen in the following example If three relatives of mine die I will inherit a house Among this sentence s reading is one which means There exists a set of three relatives such that if those three relatives die I will inherit a house On this reading the indefinite three relatives of mine takes existential scope outside the conditional it asserts unconditionally that those three relatives do in fact exist However if the indefinite takes distributive scope inside the conditional the speaker will inherit a house if three relatives die not if x dies where x can be any of those three relatives Definite descriptions have also been argued to have split scope Definites are classically considered to presuppose that their referents are unique For instance the definite description the cat is infelicitous in a context where there are multiple cats which the speaker could have in mind However this generalization seems to be contradicted by Haddock descriptions such as the following Context In front of the speaker are numerous hats one of which contains a rabbit Haddock description The rabbit in the hat This noun phrase is felicitous to use in this context even though there is no unique hat What seems to license this surprising use of the definite description is the fact that the context contains a unique rabbit containing hat To cash out this idea it has been proposed that the uniqueness presupposition of the hat takes scope separately from the rest of the definite s meaning In other words a witness set is established low in the structure but is checked for singletonness higher up Scope islands While operators can often take scope above their surface position there are not entirely free to take scope wherever they want For instance as illustrated by Sentence 1 below quantifiers that originate inside an if clause usually cannot take scope outside of that if clause This sentence cannot mean that Beth will inherit one house for each dead relative If every relative of mine dies I will inherit a house This fact parallels the fact that a wh phrase cannot be extracted from an if clause as shown in Sentence 2 Which relativei will you inherit a fortune if ti dies Examples of this sort have been used to argue that scope relations are determined by syntactic movement operations Aside from their theoretical significance scope islands are also practically useful since they can be used to construct unambiguous paraphrases of sentences with scope ambiguities Exceptional scope While most operators are unable to scope out of an island others can For instance the indefinite a in the sentence below can take scope outside of its surface position inside an if clause This sentence can mean that there is a particular relative who must die for the speaker to get a house If a relative of mine dies I will inherit a house Examples of this sort have been used to argue that indefinites do not have standard generalized quantifier denotations On the choice function approach proposed by Tanya Reinhart indefinites contribute a variable over choice functions which can be existentially closed at any point higher in the structure Angelika Kratzer proposed another choice function based theory which is similar to Reinhart s except that the choice function variable is left free Recent work such as Charlow 2020 treats indefinites as denoting sets of individuals which can be type shifted so that they take scope in a manner similar to Karttunen s 1977 alternative based mechanism for wh questions Formal approaches to scopeTanya Reinhart pioneered the structural approach to scope The structural view of scope is one influential view which posits a close relationship between syntax and semantics This approach is characterized by the following hypothesis first formulated by Tanya Reinhart Hypothesis about scope and domain The semantic scope of an operator corresponds to the position of the item which expresses it at some level of syntactic representation This view is widely adopted in generative approaches such as that of Heim and Kratzer 1998 In these approaches the relevant syntactic level is logical form and the syntactic notion which corresponds to semantic scope is typically identified as c command In structural approaches discrepancies between an expression s surface position and its semantic scope are explained by syntactic movement operations such as quantifier raising The movement approach is motivated in large part by the fact that quantifier scope seems to obey many of the same restrictions that movement does e g islands One prominent alternative to the structural view is the type shifting view first proposed by Barbara Partee and Mats Rooth This approach uses type shifters to govern scopal relations Since type shifters are applied during the process of semantic interpretation this approach allows scopal relations to be partly independent of syntactic structure The type shifting approach serves as the basis of many recent proposals for exceptional scope split scope and other troublesome scope related phenomena See alsoContinuation passing style De dicto and de re Generalized quantifier Logical form linguistics Quantifier linguistics Type shifterReferencesHeim Irene Kratzer Angelika 1998 Semantics in Generative Grammar Oxford Wiley Blackwell pp 194 198 Ruys Eddy Winter Yoad 2011 Quantifier scope in formal linguistics PDF In Gabbay Dov Guenthner Franz eds Handbook of Philosophical Logic 2 ed Dordrecht Springer pp 159 225 doi 10 1007 978 94 007 0479 4 3 ISBN 978 94 007 0478 7 Potts Chris 2000 When even no s Neg is splitsville Jorge Hankamer WebFest University of California Santa Cruz Linguistic Department Retrieved 30 August 2020 Barker Chris 2015 Scope PDF In Lappin Shalom Fox Chris eds Handbook of Contemporary Semantics 2 ed Wiley Blackwell Section 4 3 doi 10 1002 9781118882139 ch2 ISBN 9781118882139 Szabolcsi Anna 2010 Quantification Cambridge University Press p 92 Eddy Ruys 1992 The scope of indefinites PhD Utrecht University Bumford Dylan 2017 Split scope definites Relative superlatives and Haddock descriptions PDF Linguistics and Philosophy 40 6 549 593 doi 10 1007 s10988 017 9210 2 S2CID 254742178 Haddock Nicholas 1987 Incremental interpretation and Combinatory Categorial Grammar Proceedings of The 10th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence The 10th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Vol 2 Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc Ruys Eddy Winter Yoad 2011 Quantifier scope in formal linguistics PDF In Gabbay Dov Guenthner Franz eds Handbook of Philosophical Logic 2 ed Dordrecht Springer Section 3 2 doi 10 1007 978 94 007 0479 4 3 ISBN 978 94 007 0478 7 Barker Chris 2015 Scope PDF In Lappin Shalom Fox Chris eds Handbook of Contemporary Semantics 2 ed Wiley Blackwell Section 1 6 doi 10 1002 9781118882139 ch2 ISBN 9781118882139 Barker Chris 2015 Scope PDF In Lappin Shalom Fox Chris eds Handbook of Contemporary Semantics 2 ed Wiley Blackwell Section 5 doi 10 1002 9781118882139 ch2 ISBN 9781118882139 Reinhart Tanya 1997 Quantifier scope How labor is divided between QR and choice functions Linguistics and Philosophy 20 4 335 397 doi 10 1023 A 1005349801431 S2CID 58351641 Kratzer Angelika 1998 Scope or pseudoscope Are there wide scope indefinites In Rothstein Susan ed Events and grammar Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy Vol 70 Dordrecht Springer pp 163 196 doi 10 1007 978 94 011 3969 4 8 ISBN 978 1 4020 0289 2 Charlow Simon 2020 The scope of alternatives Indefiniteness and islands Linguistics and Philosophy 43 3 427 472 doi 10 1007 s10988 019 09278 3 S2CID 254749307 Karttunen Lauri 1977 Syntax and semantics of questions Linguistics and Philosophy 1 1 3 44 doi 10 1007 BF00351935 S2CID 64174420 Szabolcsi Anna 2010 Quantification Cambridge University Press Reinhart Tanya 1979 Syntactic domains for semantic rules In Gunthner Franz Schmidt J S eds Formal Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Languages Dordrecht D Reidel ISBN 978 90 277 0778 9 Heim Irene Kratzer Angelika 1998 Semantics in Generative Grammar Oxford Wiley Blackwell pp 184 188 Ruys Eddy Winter Yoad 2011 Quantifier scope in formal linguistics PDF In Gabbay Dov Guenthner Franz eds Handbook of Philosophical Logic 2 ed Dordrecht Springer pp 159 225 doi 10 1007 978 94 007 0479 4 3 ISBN 978 94 007 0478 7 Barker Chris 2015 Scope PDF In Lappin Shalom Fox Chris eds Handbook of Contemporary Semantics 2 ed Wiley Blackwell pp 40 76 doi 10 1002 9781118882139 ch2 ISBN 9781118882139 Partee Barbara Rooth Mats 1983 Generalized conjunction and type ambiguity In von Stechow Arnim Schwarze Christoph Bauerle Rainer eds Meaning Use and Interpretation of Language Berlin de Gruyter pp 334 356 doi 10 1002 9780470758335 ch14 ISBN 9780470758335 Partee Barbara 1986 Noun phrase interpretation and type shifting principles PDF In Groenendijk Jeroen de Jong Dick Stokhof Martin eds Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers Dordrecht Foris ISBN 9067652679 S2CID 96440512 Archived from the original PDF on 2020 02 11
