Constantinou, H;
Van de Koot, H;
(2015)
Epistemic Containment and the Encoding of Scope.
In: Bui, T and Özyildiz, D, (eds.)
Proceedings of the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.
(pp. pp. 151-164).
Graduate Linguistics Student Association (GSLA): Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.
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Abstract
This paper is concerned with the phenomenon of epistemic containment (von Fintel and Iatridou 2003). We discuss epistemic containment with modal auxiliaries, model adverbs and modal raising predicates and argue that the full data pattern provides strong support for a syntactic encoding of scope that relies on the projection of scope indices (in the spirit of a proposal first made in Williams 1994) combined with a particular condition on scope shift (the CSS; Neeleman and van de Koot 2012). The CSS-based theory of scope predicts an asymmetry between overt and covert scope-taking that we show is also present in the epistemic containment data. In particular, covert scope extension exhibits restrictions not present with its overt counterpart. Such an asymmetry seems unexpected on a QR-based alternative. The CSS-based account of epistemic containment correctly predicts a further scope freezing effects with epistemic modals that we believe have not been previously reported in the literature, as well as the existence of structures in which an epistemic category occurs in the c-command domain of a deontic category.
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