Scope Without Scope Economy in Null Argument Constructions

Building on Fox’s Scope Economy, Takahashi proposes an analysis of scope interactions in Japanese null argument constructions. Scope Economy prevents covert scope-shifting operations such as Quantifier Raising (QR) from being semantically vacuous. Equating scrambling of Japanese null arguments with QR, Takahashi argues that null arguments are also subject to Scope Economy and thus exhibit the same scope asymmetries observed in English VP-ellipsis. In this paper, we examine Korean null argument constructions, which exhibit the same patterns as their Japanese counterparts, and argue that Takahashi’s Scope Economy-based account falls short of capturing the full range of scope facts. Specifically, we show that scope asymmetries persist even when Scope Economy-violating scrambling takes place. This problem is not confined to null argument constructions but also arises in fragments. We argue that Schwarzschild’s GIVENness constraint, in conjunction with Parallelism, accounts for scope patterns in Korean null argument constructions, without recourse to Scope Economy. We further suggest that the proposed analysis can extend to English, thereby undermining the necessity of Scope Economy in both languages.