Two kinds of reconstruction
Winfried Lechner · Studia Linguistica · 1998
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.