How is the second clause of (67a) interpreted asBill likes bananas, and how is the second clause of (67b) interpreted as
Fred threw his term paper in the garbage?In particular, there is no way to syntactically reconstruct the antecedent ofdo the
same thingin(67b), sincethrow...in the garbagesis a non-constituent. The answer proposed by Akmajian (1973) is that
these kinds of ellipsis involve paired foci, and they take as their antecedent the Common Ground of thefirst clause.
With the formalization of Common Ground suggested in (66), this antecedent is easily accessible, with no further
ado.^224
There are also connections between information structure and the referential tier. In particular, since Topic is
something independently known to the hearer, and to which the hearer's attention can be drawn, it cannot be
referentially licensed by something in the comment, as observed by Partee (1991). Thus it has to be independently
grounded. The effect is that it is outside the scope of quantifiers in the comment. Consider (68).
(68) a.Every girl danced with one of the boys.
b. One of the boys was danced with by every girl.
c. One of the boys, every girl danced with.(68a) preferably has the narrow scope reading of one in which each girl danced with a different boy. (68b), withone of
the boysin subject position, favors but does not require a wide-scope reading, in which the same boy danced with each
girl. This is because subject position is preferably interpreted as Topic. (68c) hasone of the boysin a construction that
requiresit to be understood as Topic, and so the wide scope reading is obligatory.
Furthermore, section 12.4 showed thateveryrequires a bound variable that is referentially licensed by the event in the
scopeofthequantifier. Thusthevariablecannotbeindependentlygrounded inthereferentialtier. Wetherefore predict
thatevery Ncannot serve as a topic. This seems correct.Every Ncan of course appear as a subject, but subjects need
not be Topics. On the other hand,every Nis ungrammatical in the preposed position that marks topics:
(69) a.*Every girl, one of the boys danced with.
b. *As for every girl, one of the boys danced with her.Thus we can perhaps get certain scope effects simply through the meaning of the information structure tier, without
appealing to further machinery such as quantifier lifting or lambda extraction.
416 SEMANTIC AND CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS
(^224) In particular, there is no need for syntactic reconstruction or for semantic lambda extraction, solutions that have been popular in the literature. See however n. 17 for a
proble mthat arises in the referential tier.