The semantics-pragmatics interface of quantifier scope in Mandarin

Mandarin has long been known as a "scope rigid language" (Huang, 1982) in that doubly quantified sentences generally do not display scope ambiguity; sentences containing multiple quantifiers only permit the surface scope (SS) but not the inverse scope (IS) reading. However, recent studies argue that scope ambiguity does manifest in more complicated data, e.g. double object constructions (DOC) and non-finite complement clauses (Lin, 2013; Larson & Wu, 2018). Unfortunately, these studies offer no empirical evidence or theoretical justification for such claim. The present study sets out to experimentally investigate whether quantifier scope ambiguity in Mandarin are accessible to native speakers.