The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, March 31 at 3pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw.
Jonny Palucci (McGill) will be discussing “Functional relative clauses and pseudo-scope.” Here is Jonny’s abstract:
Sentences where a definite DP is modified by a relative clause containing a universal quantifier (relativized DPs), like the supervisor that each volunteer reported to, license readings which carry separate presuppositions of uniqueness and existence for each volunteer—henceforth, `varying definite readings’. Barker (2022) argues that these readings involve the universal DP scoping out of the relative clause and above the definite determiner, proposing to analyze them using a non-local scope shifting mechanism, like quantifier raising (QR). In this talk, I argue for a functional interpretation of the relativized DP and propose that varying definite readings result from the definite DP denoting an <e, e> function, from volunteers to supervisors. I present several arguments in favour of a functional analysis, all of which involve readings a QR based approach fails to capture. Combining these arguments with the fact that existing functional machinery can also be minimally extended to derive varying definite readings, I conclude that non-local QR is not necessary to handle these examples. The empirical generalization that emerges is that we can maintain the assumption that relative clauses are scope islands for universal quantifiers.