Luke Tuttle, University of Utah
It is well known that in some instances, only one scope relation is possible for a sentence, irrespective of the context (see Szabolcsi 2010 for constraints on scope). Von Fintel and Iatridou 2003 (vF&I) however, describe a novel restriction on scope the Epistemic Containment Principle. It involves epistemic modals (verbs that express the speaker’s level of certainty that something is true, e.g. may, might, must) and a quantifier subject. Consider the following scenario: You and a friend are standing in front of a student residence. In some of the rooms the light is on, in other rooms it is off. Every room is equipped with a special device that automatically switches off the light if a student leaves his/her room. Thus, we know that some students are home, because some lights are on. Your friend then says: (1) Every student may have left. vF&I’s central claim is that quantifiers cannot scope over epistemic modals—in (1), Every student and may respectively. For (1) to appear congruent with its context, the subject must be the element taking wide scope, though due to the ECP we cannot get access to this scope configuration which is why it fails to sound acceptable. The focus of my research is to investigate whether or not marked intonation on either the subject or the modal may provide access to this restricted scope configuration, an idea that was explicitly noted in vF&I 2003 (footnote 7). If marked intonation does have such an effect it would warrant revisiting our fundamental understanding of the interaction between the sound and meaning components of language known to linguists as PF (phonological form) and LF (logic form) respectively. Specifically, the intonation I am investigating involves two prosodic patterns: nuclear stress and the rise-fall contour with neutral intonation used as a control condition. I have created an online survey which asks respondents to give acceptability judgements of sentences similar to (6) on a Likert scale 1-5. The survey contains 12 items and 10 fillers. Each item contains one of five conditions, the type of prosody placed on either the modal or the subject. The ordering of items and fillers is varied across the subject pool to control for carry-over effects. We intend on collecting data from approximately 50 participants. Some statistical method, for example ANOVA, will be used to determine the existence of an effect.