ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the results of an experiment that was designed to examine Chinese-speaking children's interpretations of sentences containing the universal quantifier and the existential quantifier. It provides some evaluation of some scope principles that were proposed to account for the Chinese scope facts. The data are used to evaluate some controversial predictions suggested by several theoretical analyses concerning Chinese scope relations. The purpose of the experiment was to acquire preliminary evidence about Chinese-speaking children's understanding of scope relations and to see whether they know which relations are possible for particular syntactic configurations. For the most part, linguists agree on the judgments of scope relations concerning most Chinese sentences. The structure-dependent notion of c-command, although not yet clear-cut in its role, is a potential determining factor for Chinese scope interpretation.
