Susi Wurmbrand: Linguistics Colloquium

This talk proposes a connection between the findings from the cross-linguistic research on restructuring, in particular the diversity of domain transparency for operations such as clitic climbing and scrambling, and various puzzles related to the domain of quantifier raising (QR). Based on the distribution of restructuring in a wide range of languages, I first present new evidence for a Grohmann’sche organization of clauses into three domains. I then show that difficulties and inconsistencies reported for QR across different types of clauses reflect the complexity of the structure as determined by the domain-based approach to clause structure. I hypothesize that clause-boundedness effects observed for QR are only apparent, and that the difficulty associated with constructing non-clause-bound inverse scope interpretations is attributed to increased processing costs calculated based on the complexity of the structure, specifically the number of domains crossed.