Information Structure and Scope in German

Previous approaches to quantifier scope in German have relied on a disjunctive approach in which either higher rank on the grammatical function hierarchy or linear precedence allows a given NP to have distributive scope. In this paper, we instead tie the possibility of quantifier scope in German directly to information structure: only topics can have distributive scope. We present a new feature-based account of the information-structure concepts that are needed to predict German word order, and embed these features in f-structures, in effect amalgamating f-structure and i-structure information in a single level of representation. This amalgamated representation serves firstly as the input to a compositional logical form representation of the sentence, and secondly as a set of instructions as to how to articulate the compositional representation into, in particular, topical and non-topical components. The optional application of a distributivity operator to the topical component completes the analysis. This analysis not only obviates the need for a disjunctive approach to quantifier scope, but also neatly accounts for perceived discrepancies in the availability of particular readings with standard and non-standard predicates.