QUD effects on epistemic containment principle

an experimental study

Abstract

The Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP) requires that epistemic modals take
wider scope than strong quantifiers such as every or most (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2003). Although
fairly robust in its realization, a few systemic classes of counterexamples to the ECP
have been noted. Based on these, previous work has argued for two claims: subjective modals
obey the ECP, whereas objective ones don’t (Tancredi, 2007; Anand and Hacquard, 2008); and
every respects the ECP, whereas each violates it (Tancredi, 2007). This paper argues that explicit
Questions Under Discussion (QUDs; Roberts, 1996; Ginzburg, 1996) also systematically
influence the ECP: scopal orderings that provide relevant answers to the given QUDs are preferred,
and this tendency can override the ECP. To support this claim, the paper presents an
experimental study. The results corroborate the existence of systematic QUD effects on the
ECP, and support the view that the ECP is derived from a confluence of various pragmatic and
lexical biases.
Keywords: Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP), epistemic modals, Question Under Discussion
(QUD), quantifiers, scopal ambiguity, experimental semantics.