Frozen Scope and WCO: New Insights into the Structure of Russian Ditransitives

Abstract

We present novel data on Russian ditransitives with two Quantificational objects, which parallel the relevant English facts (Larson 1990) whereby inverse scope disappears when the quantificational Dative precedes the quantificational Accusative within the VP. We argue that the Russian facts should not be analyzed in terms of Superiority, as in English (Bruening 2001). Furthermore, wider possibilities for overt QP displacement in Russian and the scope freezing that obtains in such contexts (Antonyuk-Yudina 2009), taken with the observed parallelism between the two languages in the relevant respects, allow us a new perspective on the scope freezing in ditransitives for both languages.