Sentences like Mary needs to make the fewest mistakes on the upcoming test have a 'split scope' reading roughly paraphrasable as 'Mary exceeds all others in terms of how many mistakes she must not make'; that is, her situation is the most precarious. The structural approach to this phenomenon attributes to such sentences a logical form resembling this paraphrase, in which the superlative component of the meaning of fewest scopes above the modal need to and the negative component scopes below it. This paper investigates analogous structures in Syrian Arabic, a language in which superlatives may appear at a distance from their scalar associates in the surface order. The syntax of such expressions in Syrian Arabic, and the range of interpretations available to the various syntactic permutations found there points to two different sources for split scope readings. While some split scope readings are derived by syntactic splitting of fewest across a modal verb, others arise from a semantic ambiguity in the modal verb itself, rather than from a syntactic distinction in logical form.
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