English VP-preposing and relative scope

VP-preposed sentences in English are, contrary to earlier claims in the literature, found to be scopally ambiguous between a subject wide-scope and an object wide-scope reading. A syntactic and semantic analysis is proposed in which the subject wide-scope reading results from preposing the VP containing the object in one chunk. The object wide-scope reading, on the other hand, results from object preposing prior to preposing of the remnant VP. Additional support for this analysis comes from analogous sentences in Swiss German where the resulting surface strings are distinct for the two structures.