Scope as a Source for Non‐Incremental Effects?

ABSTRACT Incrementality is one of the hallmarks of realtime language comprehension. It contrasts sharply with another feature of language comprehension, the high degree of context dependence exhibited by many expressions calling for global adaptations to the larger discourse context. The present article highlights the importance of the semantic notion of scope for the interpretation of operators of various sorts. We review a number of non‐incremental effects from previous literature and hypothesize that they can be better understood if we consider the processing domains in terms of scope that may be underlying their interpretation. To do so, we propose a novel account, the Scope‐Domain Account , mediating between immediate specification and local underspecification. We apply this account to findings from the literature contrasting incremental and non‐incremental effects observed for negation and quantifiers but also apply it to phenomena that have only rarely been connected to scope processing so far.