Prosodic disambiguation and the scope ambiguity of sentences with negation and disjunction in Dutch

Abstract

Work on the prosody-semantics interface has established that prosody can disambiguate sentences, including constructions with a scopal interaction of two logical connectives. Our study presents a novel case, investigating the effect of prosody on the interaction of sentences with negation and disjunction in Dutch. In a perception experiment 46 adult native speakers of Dutch took a forced-choice selection task for Dutch sentences similar to Some children don’t like red or blue. They were given stories that focused on the OR narrow scope (‘neither A nor B’) or the OR wide scope reading ('not A or not B’) and had to select one of two audio recordings of the same sentence that differed prosodically. For the OR narrow scope reading, participants strongly preferred a prosodic contour with neutral accent on OR, whereas for the OR wide scope reading they preferred a rise-fall contour with a pause before OR. These patterns show that prosody plays a role in distinguishing the two readings. This finding contributes new insights from prosody about the nature of a typological distinction between languages where some, like Dutch, prefer the OR narrow scope reading and others the OR wide scope reading.