Pragmatics and prosody in production and comprehension of scopally ambiguous sentences

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze scopally ambiguous Russian sentences containing sentential negation and NPs with the quantifier ‘all’ following the verb. While prosody has been shown to disambiguate scope in artificial examples lacking pragmatic cues, we aimed to examine its role in real usage, including production and comprehension of natural sentences. For production, we collected examples from the Multimedia Russian Corpus and analyzed their interpretations and prosodic properties. For comprehension, we conducted an experiment with recorded sentences based on corpus phrases, featuring both natural and unnatural prosodic patterns. Participants chose between scopally different interpretations using prosodic and pragmatic cues. Our findings reveal that although prosody can mark scope and affect interpretation, it is not consistently used in naturalistic data. In production, stress often conveys emphasis and contrast rather than scope. In comprehension, interpretation is influenced more by pragmatic feasibility than by information structure expressed through prosody.