The different readings of wieder 'again': a structural account

Abstract

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.

Adjectives of completeness as maximizers of event nominalizations

“…First, it accounts for the fact that adverbs of completeness are modifiers internal to the VP. Two facts constitute evidence that these adverbs are VP modifiers, namely, they are restricted to a postverbal position (45) (Jackendoff 1972;Piñón 2005) and they take narrow scope with respect to the two readings of again (46) (Piñón 2005;see Dowty 1979;von Stechow 1996). Especifically, in both readings in (46) the adverb is in the scope of de nuevo 'again'.…”

The argument structure of adjectival participles revisited

“…there is no empirical motivation that causatives involve more eventive verbal layers than anticausatives (e.g. von Stechow 1996, Pylkkänen 2008) (see Martin & Schäfer to appear for further references and discussion). Therefore, we follow Kratzer (2005), Alexiadou et al (2006, to appear) and Schäfer (2012), and take both causatives and anticausatives to be bi-eventive (in the sense that they involve two eventualities, one verbal event v and a Result State), so that the former differ from the latter only in the presence of a Voice layer (Kratzer 1996) introducing an external argument, as illustrated in (17).…”

Deriving full repetition in Blackfoot with additive focus

“…MAX (P)(e) = 1 iff P(e) and there is no e such that e is a proper subpart of e and P(e ) = 1. (von Stechow 1996).…”