Semantic representations as procedures for verification

Doubly quantified sentences can be ambiguous (Every man knows some woman) or unambiguous (Every man knows every woman). For active and passive sentences of these types, we elicited from subjects three types of judgments designed to reflect which quantifier they assigned wide scope in interpreting the sentence. There was a strong tendency for the three measures to agree, and for these agreements to fall on the surface structure subject of the sentence, independent of sentence type. The data are interpreted as showing a tendency for the first quantifier to include the second within its scope; thus for both ambiguous and unambiguous sentence types active sentences tend to be interpreted differently from their passive transforms. A semantic theory adequate to capture this phenomenon must assign sentences semantic representations specifying not only truth-conditions but also procedures for verification.