Different again

Abstract

One of the open questions in the literature on again-type elements (such as English again and German wieder ‘again’) is how to derive their different readings. Specifically, we can differentiate between a repetitive reading (e.g., some activity happens that has happened before) and a restitutive reading (e.g., some activity that has not happened before restores an earlier state). One controversial question is whether these two readings involve lexical ambiguity of ‘again’ (the lexical ambiguity analysis) or whether they can be derived from one lexical entry of ‘again’ by assuming different structural configurations (the scope analysis). We investigate Kutchi Gujarati pacho ‘again’ and show that this again-type element has, in fact, three readings, which are best accounted for by combining both the lexical ambiguity analysis and the scope analysis within the same language. Moreover, Kutchi Gujarati is a language in which word order closely reflects information structure. This allows us to investigate the information-structural effects that are associated with different readings of pacho ‘again’, such as the “all-given” status of utterances with repetitive pacho, and the corresponding surface word orders.