Masha on scope in heritage languages
Now out in Glossa,
Cross-linguistic scope ambiguity: When two systems meet by
Gregory Scontras,
Maria Polinsky,
C.-Y. Edwin Tsai and
Kenneth Mai. The paper reports that, for sentences such as "A shark ate every pirate" or "Every shark attacked a pirate," heritage Mandarin speakers lack inverse scope in Mandarin, just as native speakers of Mandarin do, and furthermore that they also lack inverse scope in English, their dominant language in adulthood. The authors interpret these results as evidence for the pressure to simplify the grammar of scope, decreasing ambiguity when possible.
