Scope of Negation, Gestures, and Prosody: The English Negative Quantifier as a Case in Point

The present paper examines how English native speakers produce scopally ambiguous sentences and how they make use of gestures and prosody for disambiguation. As a case in point, the participants in the present study produced the English negative quantifiers. They appear in two different positions as (1) The election of no candidate was a surprise (a: ‘for those elected, none of them was a surprise’; b: ‘no candidate was elected, and that was a surprise’) and (2) no candidate’s election was a surprise (a: ‘for those elected, none of them was a surprise’; b: # ‘no candidate was elected, and that was a surprise.’ We were able to investigate the gesture production and the prosodic patterns of the positional effects (i.e., a-interpretation is available at two different positions in 1 and 2) and the interpretation effects (i.e., two different interpretations are available in the same position in 1). We discovered that the participants tended to launch more head shakes in the (a) interpretation despites the different positions, but more head nod/beat in the (b) interpretation. While there is not a difference in prosody of no in (a) and (b) interpretation in (1), there are pitch and durational differences between (a) interpretations in (1) and (2). This study points out the abstract similarities across languages such as Catalan and Spanish (Prieto et al. in Lingua 131:136–150, 2013. 10.1016/j.lingua.2013.02.008; Tubau et al. in Linguist Rev 32(1):115–142, 2015. 10.1515/tlr-2014-0016) in the gestural movements, and the meaning is crucial for gesture patterns. We emphasize that gesture patterns disambiguate ambiguous interpretation when prosody cannot do so.