Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

There is, in addition, an interpretative constraint which holds true of any preverbal
quantifier in Catalan (and, I assume, in other Romance languages): they never have narrow scope
w.r.t. a another quantifier inside their clause. Narrow scope for the subject quantifier has been
reported to be less preferred in English and other languages, but I think that in Romance NSLs is
not only less preferred: it is excluded.
The facts may have often been obscured because scope interactions can be interfered by
the 'weak' status of one of the quantifiers: especially in the case of indefinite DPs with D-linked
or referential reading, this reading is such that it gives the same extensional interpretation as the
wide scope reading (consider, e.g., the sentence 'Everybody loves a certain woman', which is
extensionally equivalent to 'Everybody loves a woman' with wide scope for 'a woman'). So, in
the following example:
(12) Tot estudiant ha llegit tres llibres
Every student has read three books
we can conceive of three readings: two with scope interactions (wide scope for 'every student'
and wide scope for 'three books') and one with no scope interaction, when the numeral is
interpreted as 'some certain three books'. Since the wide-scope reading for 'three books' is
extensionally equivalent to the non-scope reading, our claim that 'every student' cannot have
narrow scope can only rely on the intuition that 'three books', when apparently wide scope, is
'referential'. So 0 cannot be conclusive w.r.t. our claim that 'every student' cannot have narrow
scope.
There are however cases where the wide scope interpretation of a quantifier is not
equivalent to its scopeless reading. Consider the scope interactions between two numerals in the
following example:
1