The Question–Answer Requirement for scope assignment
Andrea Gualmini, Sarah Hulsey, Valentine Hacquard, Danny Fox · Natural Language Semantics · 2008
This paper focuses on children’s interpretation of sentences containing negation and a quantifier (e.g., The detective didn’t find some guys ). Recent studies suggest that, although children are capable of accessing inverse scope interpretations of such sentences, they resort to surface scope to a larger extent than adults. To account for children’s behavioral pattern, we propose a new factor at play in Truth Value Judgment tasks: the Question–Answer Requirement (QAR). According to the QAR, children (and adults) must interpret the target sentence that they evaluate as an answer to a question that is made salient by the discourse.