The paper proposes the first unified account of deictic and sentence-internal readings of same / different. (A cross-linguistic survey provides motivation for such an account). The main proposal is that distributive quantification temporarily makes available two discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values of which are required by sentence-internal uses of same / different to be identical / distinct—much as their deictic uses require the values of two discourse referents to be identical / distinct. The analysis is executed in a stack-based dynamic system, and it is fully compositional because the system is couched in classical type logic. The formal account is independently motivated by quantificational subordination, the availability of both dependent and independent readings for anaphora in the scope of each, and, finally, dependent indefinites in various languages. All these phenomena provide support for the idea that natural language quantification is a composite notion, to be decomposed / analyzed in terms of discourse reference to dependencies that is multiply constrained by the various components that make up a quantifier.