| >> TOC | |
Introduction
|
For the last thirty years, syntacticians have
struggled with scrambling structures without reaching a consensus about the
mechanisms involved. In this paper I will argue that this situation is due to
two reasons: first, most of the discussion revolves around data that provide
only an obscured view on scrambling, and secondly, many analysts have pondered
the question of what kind of movement
result in scrambling structures without having shown that movement is involved at all. Furthermore, it appears at times
as if the concept of scrambling was interpreted rather loosely, such that any
unusual word order could be subsumed under the general heading of
"scrambling", which makes it even more difficult to clearly identify
general principles.
I will thus focus the discussion here on the
overt ordering of VP/IP-internal arguments. So far, I have no opinion about how
adjuncts are to be treated formally, and I will therefore ignore them
completely. Furthermore, I will try to use "purified" data wherever
possible, i.e. structures without quantifiers, negation, or distinctions with
respect to definiteness etc. I believe that all of them introduce independent
constraints on any syntactic structure, which may be difficult to separate from
"purely syntactic" mechanisms.
In the end, I will commit to a base generation
account of scrambling and combine, among others, analyses proposed by Haider
(1993) and Bayer and Kornfilt (1994) to develop a multidimensional model of
sentence structure, which strongly resembles the "tier" concept from
autosegmental phonology. While this analysis will remain sketchy, I hope at
least to raise questions that may warrant further research.
© Philipp Strazny 1997