Inverse Linking
In this paper, we will consider a phenomenon known as inverse linking, a term coined by May (1977) to describe the most salient readings of sentences such as Someone from every city despises it. What is interesting about this sort of sentence is a particular “quirk” in its interpretation, in that the embedded quantifier phrase preferentially receives a wide-scope interpretation. In the example at hand, every city has scope over someone, so that it is naturally read as meaning that for each city, there is at least one person that despises that city. Inverse linking has prompted much discussion over the last 30 years in the linguistic literature. Our aim here is to explore the influence the inverse linking phenomenon has had on syntactic theory, especially with respect to the syntactic representation of quantifier scope. By examining such issues, we hope to demonstrate how the understanding of this phenomenon has highlighted the difficulties in investigating the link between language and meaning. pdf of paper
Keywords: Inverse linking, Quantifier Raising, Quantifier Storage, Syntactic Scope, Logical Form.