Kriszta Szendroi (UCL)

Blocking quantifier raising with passives  

Quantifier raising is a covert syntactic operation, restricted by interface considerations. Fox (1995) argued that this applies locally in the syntactic derivation. Reinhart (1995) proposed that a global comparison of alternative derivations is necessary. I propose that we can decide between these two by observing sentences involving different kinds of verbs. In particular, passive sentences are truth-conditionally equivalent (save truth-value gaps) to their active counterparts involving quantifier raising. So, if the global proposal is on the right track, then it is expected that inverse scope is more easily accessed if the sentence does not have a passive variant. In this paper, I tested native speakers on the availability of inverse scope with sentences involving passivisable and nonpassivisable verbs. I found evidence in favour of Reinhart's view.