Exceptional scope out of finite complement clauses

Huilei Wang (UCLA)

This paper investigates the clause-boundedness of quantificational scope and its apparent exception in English. It is well-known that while tensed complement clauses of attitude reports (e.g. believe and claim) are scope islands, those of clause-taking verbs like ensure and make sure admit exceptionally wide scope of an embedded universal quantifier over a matrix indefinite subject (Farkas and Giannakidou 1996; Barker 2022, a.o.). Via close examination of properties independent of scope-taking that distinguish ensure from attitude reports, this paper provides a novel account for the exceptional scope-taking under ensure. The proposal consists of two ingredients: (i) tensed complement clauses in English are not uniform in their semantics, despite their morphosyntactic similarities; (ii) the semantics of a complement clause affects its transparency to scope-taking. This paper proposes a new semantics for ensure and its complement clauses, following a recent line of research on clausal complementation in which the modal meaning is relocated onto the complement C head (Kratzer 2006; Moulton 2009, 2015, a.o.), provides empirical motivations for the proposed semantics, and shows how the semantics derives the long-distance scope-taking of a universal quantifier embedded under ensure.