Abstract

It is widely assumed that the scope of indefinites is island insensitive, i.e., that, generally, an indefinite inside of a syntactic island, such as an adjunct clause, is capable of taking scope outside of that island. This paper challenges this assumption by studying the scope behaviour of the Spanish plural indefinite algunos ’). It presents an experimental study that shows that the scope of algunos is not free and depends on its syntactic environment, at least in the dialect of Spanish studied here. The paper discusses some of the implications of the study for current theories of indefinite scope: it points out the problems that choice functions and singleton indefinites have with the Spanish data, and it also discusses the implications for Schwarzschild's solution to the so-called ‘Donald Duck’ problem.