Quantifier Raising out of Mandarin relative clauses

• Published in: Natural language semantics Vol. 31; no. 1; pp. 25 - 69
• Main Author: Wang, Huilei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.03.2023; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Constraints; Focus; Grammatical subject; Linguistics; Mandarin; Philosophy of Language; Quantifiers; Relative clauses; Scope; Semantics; Social Sciences; Syntactic phases; Syntactic structures; Syntax; Locality constraints; Scope ambiguity; Covert movement; Semantic economy; Focus-sensitive operator; Phase theory
• ISSN: 0925-854X; 1572-865X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09202-3

Quantifier Raising usually exhibits finite-clause boundedness due to the syntactic and semantic constraints it is subject to (Fox 1995 , 2000 , Cecchetto 2004 , a.o.). In this paper, I argue that QR out of a Mandarin prenominal pre-determiner RC is not only properly licensed, obeying both syntactic and semantic constraints, but also needed to account for the exceptional-scope effects observed across relative clause boundaries (Huang 1982 , Aoun and Li 1993 , a.o.). I further consider constructions where the exceptional-scope effects are not present, including relative clauses containing the focus-sensitive operator dou and full-sized subject RCs, and show that the absence of the exceptional-scope effects in these constructions follows directly from the proposed analysis.