Dutch Scrambling and the Strong-Weak Distinction

It was first argued by Kerstens (1975) that the meaning of indefinite NP objects in Dutch is affected by scrambling. Kerstens claimed that whether an indefinite NP is [+quantificational] or not (in the sense of Milsark 1974) depends on its absolute position in the structure: it is [+quantificational] iff it is outside VP at S-Structure. This hypothesis has more recently been revived and extended to other languages by De Hoop (1992) and Diesing (1992). In this paper, I will attempt to show that there is insufficient empirical support for this generalization. Although the meaning of a structure containing an indefinite object NP undoubtedly varies with the position of the NP relative to other constituents, it is doubtful whether it can be shown that the semantics of the NP itself depends on its absolute position.