I will defend a purely structural account of the different readings arising from the German adverb wieder ÒagainÓ. We will be concerned with the so-called repetitive/restitutive ambiguity. The claim is that the ambiguity can be resolved entirely in terms of syntactic scope. The theory assumes a rather abstract syntax. In particular, abundant use is made of KratzerÕs (1994) voice phrase, which plays a central role for the derivation of repetitive readings. One of the leading ideas of the analysis is that the structural accusative position has wide scope with respect to the agent relation expressed by the head of the voice phrase. If wieder precedes an accusative object, a repetitive reading is obligatory. If wieder follows the accusative object, two readings are available due to two possible positions of wieder. The analysis is an improvement of the proposal of Stechow (1995). It solves a number of questions left open there and considers a range of new data. 1 The first version of this article was written for the occasion of the Krems conference on morphology (July 1992). I have changed some details, notably under the influence of KratzerÕs (1994) manuscript and a handout thereof from 1993. The main ideas have remained unaltered, however. I profited very much from discussing the material with Catherine Fabricius-Hansen, Sigrid Beck and Wilhelm Geuder. The latter wrote thorough comments on the first draft, which considerably improved its content. I also have to thank two anonymous referees of the Journal of Semantics for important comments.
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