Presuppositional Effects of Scrambling Reconsidered*

(2). If bare plurals have a generic reading, they can occur in the scrambled position as
shown in (1’).
(1) Bare Plurals:
a. dat de politie gisteren taalkundigen opgepakt heeft
that the police yesterday linguists arrested has
b. *dat de politie taalkundigen gisteren opgepakt heeft
that the police linguists yesterday arrested has
‘that the police arrested linguists yesterday’
(De Hoop 1992[1996]:145)
(1’) dat de politie taalkundigen altijd opgepakt heeft
that the police linguists always arrested has
‘that the police always arrested linguists’
(De Hoop 1992 [1996]:146)
(2) Definite NPs:
a. dat de politie gisteren de taalkundigen opgepakt heeft
that the police yesterday the linguists arrested has
b. dat de politie de taalkundigen gisteren opgepakt heeft
that the police the linguists yesterday arrested has
‘that the police arrested the linguists yesterday’
(De Hoop 1992[1996]:145-146)
Turning to cardinal NPs, De Hoop observes that they have either an existential reading
or a partitive reading when they are in the unscrambled position, but when they are
scrambled, they can only have a partitive reading, as illustrated in the contrast between
(3a) and (3b).
(3) Cardinal NPs:
a. dat de polite gisteren veel taalkundigen opgepakt heeft
that the police yesterday many linguists arrested has
‘that the police arrested many linguists yesterday’ (existential reading)
‘that the police arrested many of the linguists yesterday’ (partitive reading)
b. dat de polite veel taalkundigen gisteren opgepakt heeft
that the police many linguists yesterday arrested has
‘that the police arrested many of the linguists yesterday’ (partitive reading)
(De Hoop 1992[1996]:146)
Similar observations are made in Diesing (1992) for German scrambling.
De Hoop (1992) and Diesing (1992) have each given a syntactic analysis to this
apparently semantic effect of object-scrambling in Dutch and German, respectively.
Although their analyses are rather different from each other in the details, they both
argue that semantic properties such as specificity, genericity, and partitivity are encoded
syntactically: weak and strong Cases in the case of De Hoop, who bases her analysis on
2