Accessing the availability of inverse scope in German in the covered box paradigm

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a novel experimental approach to relative quantifier scope in German that elicits data in a less direct manner. Applying the covered-box method (Huang et al. 2013; Sayeed et al. 2019) to scope phenomena, we show that inverse scope is available to some extent in the free constituent order language German, thereby validating both earlier findings on other syntactic configurations in German (Radó & Bott 2018) and empirical claims on other free constituent languages (Japanese, Russian, Hindi), as well as recent corpus findings in Webelhuth (2020). Moreover, the results of the indirect covered-box experiment replicate findings from an earlier direct-query experiment on parallel target items, in which participants were asked directly about the availability of surface scope and inverse scope readings. The configuration of interest was constituted by canonical transitive clauses with deaccented existential subject and universal object QPs in which the restriction of the universal QP is provided by the context.