On the scope of indefinites and underspecification

Abstract

Sentences with indefinites inside scope islands allow for truth-conditions that seemingly require the indefinite, when viewed as an existential quantifier, to take scope outside of the island. This phenomenon of exceptional scope has given rise to numerous theories. Novel data show that what is standardly taken to be an exceptional scope construal of the indefinite should be seen as syntactically and semantically parallel to its regular scope construal. Ambiguity approaches to the scope of indefinites are incompatible with this observation. Given their very weak semantics for exceptional scope construals, competing functional approaches could be made to be compatible with the observation. The consequence of that, however, would be massive overgeneration of exceptional scope construals. To remedy this situation a novel non-ambiguity approach in terms of underspecification is sketched relying on one and the same LF for regular and exceptional scope construals. The resulting disjunctive meanings associated with such LFs are compatible with both regular and exceptional scope readings, accounting for the parallelism data. This view is shown to make desirable predictions regarding the interaction of exceptional scope construals with negation, unlike in functional approaches.