Long-Distance Scrambling, VP Ellipsis, and Scope Economy in Russian

The paper presents evidence suggesting that Scope Economy (Fox, 2000) constraints QP scope in Russian just the way it does in English. It also discusses a wide range of data on Long Distance Scrambling and argues that Quantifier Scope in Russian LDS sentences is also semantically constrained by the Scope Economy Principle: the scope derived as a result of scrambling a QP long distance is allowed if and only if this scope reading would not have been available prior to Scrambling. With Scope Economy (along with other output constraints) having been argued to be operative in Japanese Long Distance Scrambling as well (Miyagawa, 2006), our data constitutes further cross-linguistic evidence that reinforces the idea of Scrambling not being semantically vacuous (Bailyn, 2001). The data also constitutes evidence in favor of the Scope Economy Principle itself as well as offers some insights into quantifier scope availability in Russian.