The cost of raising quantifiers

Abstract

The main proposal of this paper is that quantifier raising (QR) is not subject to QR-specific locality or domain restrictions but that differences observed between overt and covert movement are the result of an increased processing burden associated with multiple steps of covert movement and the lack of a cue for the parser to initiate a search for a covert dependency. One of the main observations is that QR from different types of clausal complements is gradient and speakers’ acceptance of non-local inverse scope tracks syntactic complexity defined over clausal domains. The account develops a preliminary algorithm for calculating processing costs based on the complexity of the structure, which in turn is reflected in the number of steps QR has to undergo in a cyclic movement approach to inverse scope.