Lexical and structural cues to quantifier scope relations

Previous studies have shown that ambiguous doubly quantified sentences such as “Every child loves some toy” reliably receive a preferred interpretation which assigns wide scope to the first of the two quantifiers. In particular, the active sentence above and its passive transform have different preferred interpretations. In the present study an attempt was made to select between two previously conflated accounts of this finding, namely that scope relations are assigned on the basis of the left-to-right order of the quantifiers or on the basis of which quantifier is part of the surface structure subject NP. One-hundred ninety-two subjects judged whether various more complex doubly quantified sentences were true or false of hypothetical situations designed so that different interpretations of the sentences would yield different truth-value judgments. Neither of the two hypotheses mentioned was supported; rather, a more complicated pattern of results was obtained, the description of which requires us to take into account properties of the specific quantifiers studied as well as both surface and deep grammatical roles of the quantified NPs.