UCLA

Korean speakers split into two groups regarding how they interpret a negative sentence with a quantified object, such as "The boy didn't eat every cookie" (Han et al. 2007). For a scenario in which a boy eats some but not all cookies, some speakers regard the sentence as a truthful description of the scenario, while other speakers do not. In other words, only the former accepts the wide scope reading of negation (the not>every reading). One hypothesis of this fact is that each group of speakers has a different grammar, where the distinction rests on whether the verb moves to T or not; this is Han et al.'s (2007) two-grammar hypothesis. Certain theories of the syntax-phonology interface (e.g. Samuels 2011) predict that the grammatical split should be accompanied by a phonological split. Specifically, the prediction is that the Post-Obstruent Tensing process in Korean for speakers who reject the not>every reading should be blocked from applying between the transitive verb and the object of a simple declarative sentence. A two-part experiment composed of a truth-value judgment task and a production task was conducted to test the prediction. The result reproduced the findings of Han et al. (2007) and showed that speakers' scope judgments have no notable correlation with the occurrence of Post-Obstruent Tensing. In the discussion, alternative theories of the syntax-phonology interface and problematic aspects of the two-grammar hypothesis are considered.