TY - JOUR TI - Scope of comparative quantifiers DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3ZP485R PY - 2015 AB - This thesis examines the scope taking property of comparative quantifier phrases (CQPs) in English. It has been widely acknowledged that scope of CQPs in non-subject position is frozen at the surface position: CQPs must take narrow scope relative to a subject quantifier. Experimental evidence provided in this thesis, however, suggests that CQPs in non-subject position can take wide scope over a quantifier in subject position. Given the findings, I argue that scope of non-subject CQPs is not absolutely frozen at the surface position and the scope taking property is significantly influenced by contextual factors. The experimental results show that participants are able to access the inverse scope reading when a test sentence is given under a context in which the surface scope interpretation is not compatible with general world knowledge. The results also indicate that the scope taking property of CQPs with respect to a subject quantifier is not different from that of plural numerals, which are assumed to take wide scope over a subject quantifier. The findings raise the possibility that the widely believed scope rigidity of CQPs is governed not by the grammar, but by extragrammatical factors: taking wide scope is strongly disfavored but crucially not ungrammatical. This possibility can be extended to other quantifiers and languages that have shown scope freezing phenomena. I take Japanese, a scope rigid language, as an example and discuss the defreezing effect of the contextual manipulation. KW - Linguistics KW - English language--Quantifiers KW - Grammar, Comparative and general--Quantifiers LA - eng ER -