This paper describes, on one hand, the distribution of the extraction of prepositional attributes, and on the other hand, proposes a theory that explains this. The empirical investigation of the phenomenon shows that topicalization is purely governed by grammatical principles and can be captured through movement theory. However, the scrambling operation is different: it is licensed by the context on one hand, but on the other hand, it is also constrained by grammatical principles. Scrambling is thus governed by both the sentence-related system of grammaticality and the context-related system of appropriateness. This problematic interaction of the two systems for generative theories is explained within the framework of optimality theory based on a further development of Müller’s subhierarchy model.