Not Too Strong! Generalizing the Scope Economy Condition

Abstract

Fox (1995, 2000) argued that covert scope shifting operations (CSSOs) such as QR or reconstruction are subject to a semantic economy condition: they are not licensed if they are semantically vacuous. In this paper, we argue for a generalization of this condition according to which a CSSO is ruled out not only if it is vacuous, but also if it leads to a reading that is strictly stronger than the surface-scope reading.