Scope freezing and object shift in Ukrainian: Does Superiority matter?

Abstract

SCOPE FREEZING AND OBJECT SHIFT IN UKRAINIAN: DOES SUPERIORITY MATTER? Svitlana Antonyuk & Roksolana Mykhaylyk This remark presents novel evidence on Ukrainian Specificity-inducing Object Shift in its interaction with Quantifier Scope, which suggests a generalization that whatever scope interpretations are established in the postverbal field will carry over into the preverbal field. We point out that the data present a serious challenge to the Superiority account of scope freezing (Bruening 2001) since it predicts that Object Shift of a QP will always freeze scope with respect to another object QP, contrary to fact. Furthermore, while Ukrainian OS does not obey Holmberg’s Generalization (Holmberg 1986), we argue that it is nevertheless fully comparable to Scandinavian OS. We propose to account for the data with a modified version of Fox and Pesetsky’s (2005) Cyclic Linearization, which accounts for the cross-linguistic differences with respect to OS as well as derives the peculiar OS QP scope interaction patterns we observe, which remain obscure on the Superiority account of scope freezing.