Scope

Scope taking is one of the most characteristic, distinctive, and ubiquitous phenomena in natural language. When an expression takes scope, it combines with surrounding material as its semantic argument. For instance, in Amy gave everyone a book , the semantic argument of everyone is an abstraction over the entire rest of the sentence, namely, λ x . Amy gave x a book , the property an individual has if Amy gave that individual a book. This ability to operate on surrounding context dramatically enriches (and complicates) the ways that meanings can be expressed. Although there are many formal theories of scope taking, Quantifier Raising—often thought of as a covert (silent) version of overt syntactic movement—is by far the dominant approach. There are many constraints on the availability of scope taking that depend on the identity of the scope taker as well as on its surrounding context.