If three relatives of mine die, I will inherit a house. Among this sentence's reading is one which means "There exists a set of three relatives such that, if those three relatives die, I will inherit a house." On this reading, the indefinite "three relatives of mine" takes existential scope outside the conditional–– it asserts unconditionally that those three relatives do in fact exist. However, it the indefinite takes distributive scope inside the conditional–– the speaker will inherit a house if three relatives die, not if x dies where x can be any of those three relatives. Definite descriptions have also been argued to have split scope. Definites are classically considered to presuppose that their referents are unique. For instance, the definite description "the cat" is infelicitous in a context where there are multiple cats which the speaker could have in mind. However, this generalization seems to be contradicted by Haddock descriptions such as the following: Context: In front of the speaker are numerous hats, one of which contains a rabbit. Haddock description: The rabbit in the hat This noun phrase is felicitous to use in this context, even though there is no unique hat. What seems to license this surprising use of the definite description is the fact that the context contains a unique rabbit-containing hat. To cash out this idea, it has been proposed that the uniqueness presupposition of "the hat" takes scope separately from the rest of the definite's meaning. In other words, a witness set is establishes low in the structure, but is checked for singletonness higher up. Scope islands While operators can often take scope above their surface position, there are not entirely free to take scope wherever they want. For instance, as illustrated by Sentence 1 below, quantifiers that originate inside an if-clause usually cannot take scope outside of that "if"-clause. This sentence cannot mean that Beth will inherit one house for each dead relative. If every relative of mine dies, I will inherit a house. This fact parallels the fact that a wh-phrase cannot be extracted from an "if"-clause, as shown in Sentence 2. Which relativei will you inherit a fortune if ti dies? Examples of this sort have been used to argue that scope relations are determined by syntactic movement operations. Aside from their theoretical significance, scope islands are also practically useful since they can be used to construct unambiguous paraphrases of