CLASP
The Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability

Incremental Interpretation of Relative Scope?

This talk is about the incremental construction of the semantic representation. I will first briefly introduce an incremental semantic theory that can deal with incremental construal of scope readings in an event semantic framework. The main part of this talk, however, will be about processing evidence for or rather against such a fully incremental theory.

In a running eye-tracking study, we (joint work with Fabian Schlotterbeck) investigate the time course of linear scope construal in sentences with a quantifier and negation. Semantic complexity is manipulated by comparing monotone increasing(UE) and monotone decreasing (DE) quantifiers (cf. Deschamps et al. 2015) in interaction with the presence or absence of sentence negation. An offline pretest confirmed that the sentences were interpreted as intended and a first eye-tracking experiment established clear processing differences between negated and non-negated scope disambiguated sentences with DE vs. UE quantifiers. DE quantifiers incurred overall more processing costs than UE quantifiers, and these processing costs interacted with the presence or absence of negation in the expected direction.

(1-a) Mehr als die Hälfte der Studenten hat (nicht in der Mensa gegessen¿More than half of the students has (not)in the mensa eaten¿¿More than half of the students did (not) eat in the mensa¿¿

(1-b) Weniger als die Hälfte der Studenten hat (nicht) in der Mensa gegessen¿Fewer than half of the students has (not) in the mensa eaten¿¿Fewer than half of the students did (not) eat in the mensa¿ ¿

A second eye-tracking experiment tested sentences such as (1-a/b) with the main verb occurring only after the negation with sentences with the verb aß (ate) in verb second position before the negation. The verb position was manipulated to investigate whether effects of quantificational complexity could show up even before the verbal predicate was encountered (cf. Bott & Schlotterbeck, 2015 for the same logic). To our surprise, effects of semantic complexity only showed up at the very end of the sentences and during rereading.

A third running eye-tracking experiment tests our materials embedded in larger discourse contexts establishing the Question Under Discussion (QUD): “What proportion of the students did or did not eat in the mensa, respectively?” Tian et al. (2016) proposed that non-incremental effects observed for processing negation may be due to the timing of QUD accommodation. Besides this contextual embedding the sentences were changed into cleft constructions (lit. transl. from German: It were less/more than half of the students, that (not) in the mensa have eaten). First results indicate: Even though the effects occurred earlier than in our previous experiments, complexity effects due to monotonicity still seem to only emerge after having read a complete minimal sentence including the verb. Furthermore, finding qualitatively the same pattern of effects suggests that semantic complexity is clearly at issue in sentences with DE quantifiers and negation beyond effects related to QUD accommodation.

To summerize, the results of the present study on the time course of scope interpretation reveal essentially non-incremental effects. The processing of quantifier scope thus seems to depend on a larger domain than just the scopal operators themselves. Corroborating the conclusion drawn in Bott & Schlotterbeck (2015), quantifiers seem to be interpreted with respect to scope only after having encountered a complete minimal sentence. If time allows, I will contrast the non-incremental processing of scope information with results from experiments showing highly incremental, predictive processing of quantificational restriction. Taken together, our experiments suggest a qualitatively different time course of interpreting the scope and the restrictor argument during online semantic processing.