Grabska, Dagmara;
(2025)
Scope shifting, scope freezing, and the structure of ditransitive VPs: the case of Polish.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis is concerned with scope of quantifiers in Polish and, using the case of Polish, it takes a stance in the following crosslinguistic debates: 1. What is the structure of ditransitive constructions? 2. Is the distribution of scope ambiguity in free word order languages different to or the same as in rigid word order languages? 3. Do free word order languages have quantifier raising (QR)? 4. Is QR an obligatory type-driven operation or an optional movement applied for scope shift? 5. How to account for scope freezing in the ditransitive IO-DO? Relying on a number of diagnostics, I argue for a base-generated rightward ascending structure for the ditransitive DO-IO/PP and a derived rightward descending structure for the ditransitives with the reverse word order IO/PP-DO. This novel approach to the structure of Polish ditransitives is based on the account of English ditransitive VPs in (Janke and Neeleman, 2012). I further address the empirical debate on scope of quantifiers in a series of experiments which reveal that the distribution of scope ambiguity in Polish (a free word order language) is the same as in English (a rigid word order language): simple monotransitive constructions and ditransitives DO-IO/PP are ambiguous whereas ditransitives IO/PP-DO and island constructions are unambiguous. Building on the conclusions regarding argument structure of the ditransitives and the experimental data on scope, I argue that Polish (a free word order language), in addition to scope reducing reconstruction, has a scope extending mechanism of QR. QR generates inverse scope of the object over the subject in the base-generated SVO and, under the rightward ascending structure, inverse (but linear) scope of the direct object over the indirect object in DO-IO. Moreover, the case of Polish points to QR being a marked scope shifting rather than an obligatory type driven operation. I further show that scope shifting operations are subject to a condition which constrains an intersection of their paths (cf. (Neeleman and Van de Koot, 2009)). This generalisation is then extended to account for scope freezing effect in IO/PP-DO.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Scope shifting, scope freezing, and the structure of ditransitive VPs: the case of Polish |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212190 |
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