Time and again

This can mean that it was not the first time that he had forgotten her name, or it can mean that he had learned her name and then forgotten it. In the first case, the entire process that is partly described by is repeated. In the second case, it may well have been the first time that he forgot it; but an earlier state – a state in which her name was not present to him – is restituted. Thus, sentence (1) has a “repetitive reading” and a “restitutive reading”. This terminology, which we owe to Harweg (1969), is very suggestive but also somewhat misleading. In the restitutive reading, something is repeated as well; it is just not the entire process, but the state in which it results. Thus, the difference is only in WHAT is repeated. This difference is very often brought out by intonation, a fact which has found no explanation whatsoever in the rich literature on wieder. If the main stress is on vergessen, then only the resulting state is said to obtain again, whereas main stress on wieder indicates that the entire action did not happen for the first time. As with any other ambiguity, this one may have lexical or structural reasons. If it is LEXICAL, then there must be two (or more) lexical entries wieder with the same phonological but different categorial or semantical information. This assumption has one point in its favour: in many languages, the two readings are served by different morphemes. In French, for example, and similarly in other Romance languages, the restitutive reading is often expressed by a prefix reattached to the verb stem, whereas