Quantifier Scope in Mandarin : Some Recent Issues

Mandarin is generally considered as a “scope rigid language” (Huang, 1982) in that doubly quantified sentences do not display quantifier scope ambiguity (QSA). However, some recent studies argue that scope ambiguity does manifest in more complicated data, e.g. dative constructions (DCs), embedded nonfinite clauses (ENCs), relative constructions (RCs) and inverse-linking construction (ILCs) (Lin, 2013; Larson & Wu, 2018). Unfortunately, these studies offer no empirical evidence to support such claim. In this talk we present results from three pilot experiments which challenge the ambiguity thesis, and offer a syntactic analysis to the structure of Mandarin DCs based on further scope facts.