Reversing the perspective on Quantifier Raising

Quantifier Raising is an “invisible movement” operation which removes a quantifier from an argument position and attaches it to the compositional level corresponding to its scope. QR is controversial because, from the semantic viewpoint, it requires a weakened version of compositionality, and from the syntactic viewpoint, it is not triggered by any feature. In this paper we outline a novel perspective, by reversing the direction of the syntactic computation from bottom-up to top-down. This perspective accounts for various ‘exceptional’ properties of QR, in particular, the fact that it is clause-bound, and the fact that it gives rise to Weak Crossover effects.