How Information Structure Constrains the Distribution of Intensifiers (and other categories)*

In recent work, Neeleman and Van de Koot (2008, 2012) have shown that information-structural conditions interact with the theory of scope to rule out certain linearizations of focused and topical constituents appearing in the same sentence. As has often been noted in the literature (see Eckardt 2001; Constantinou 2011; among others), the intensifier is invariably associated with topic and focus discourse roles. This implies that Neeleman and Van de Koot’s proposals make predictions about the position of intensifiers with respect to other topics and foci in the sentence. The current paper uses data from Dutch to argue that these predictions are correct. The main claim to be defended is that, when contrastively marked, the intensifier may or may not mark a domain of contrast (i.e. contrastive scope), depending on its syntactic position. It is shown that this does not only have consequences for the distribution of other contrastive expressions in the sentence but also of other quantificational categories