This essay addresses various issues concerning noun phrase interpretation in German. It is argued that the concept of Semantic Reconstruction (Cresti 1995, Rullmann 1995 can be fruitfully employed in the derivation of quantifier scope ambiguities in German. Semantic Reconstruction will be demonstrated to be an independently needed strategy of grammar, that is not parasitic on syntactic reconstruction as expressed by Copy Theory (Chomsky 1992). The basic difference between Semantic Reconstruction and syntactic reconstruction will be traced back to their asymmetric availability in scrambling chains: scrambling can be undone only by Semantic Reconstruction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.