Experimental Studies On The Interpretation Of Doubly Quantified Sentences In Chinese

Quantifier scope interpretation involves the interaction between syntax and semantics. Thus, by examining the mechanism of quantifier scope interpretation, we will certainly gain some insight into how the two interact with each other. To observe it, three experiments, an offline judgment task, a self-paced reading task and an eye-tracking experiment, were conducted to investigate the interpretation of doubly quantified sentences in Chinese, like Mei-ge qiangdao dou qiang-le yi-ge yinhang. every-CL robber all rob-ASP one-CL bank'Every robber robbed a bank.'According to current literature, doubly quantified sentences in Chinese like the above are unambiguous, which can only be interpreted as'for every robber, there is one bank which he robbed'(surface scope reading), contrary to their ambiguous English counterparts, which also allow the interpretation that'there is one bank that every robber robbed'(inverse scope reading). Specifically, three questions were examined.(i) What is the initial reading of doubly quantified sentences in Chinese?(ii)Whether inverse scope interpretation can be available if appropriate contexts are provided?(iii)What are the processing time courses engaged in quantifier scope interpretation?The results showed that (i) Initially, the language processor, by using syntactic information only, computes both S>O representation and O>S representation, thus, doubly quantified sentences in Chinese are ambiguous at least in online processing; (ii) The discourse information is not employed in initial processing of relative scope, it serves to evaluate the two representations in reanalysis; (iii) The lexical information of verbs affects their scope-taking patterns in both initial analysis and reanalysis; (iv) The Recency Preference is a parsing strategy used by the language processor, but it operates only in a certain domain. Based on these findings, the question of how the syntactic processor and the semantic processor interact with each other was discussed. We suggest that when processing a sentence, the syntactic processor independently generates representations without considering nonsyntactic information such as discourse plausibility, and then the semantic processor evaluates these representations according to their contextual appropriateness, and finally chooses the most semantically plausible representation, during which, the information stored in the lexicon is always consulted. All these findings lend support to the Modular Model, one of the major contenders in the literature on sentence processing.