Narrow Syntax and Phonological Form: Scrambling in the Germanic languages (Linguistik Aktuell/ Linguistics Today)

Scrambling , the kind of word order variation found in West Germanic languages, has been commonly treated as a phenomenon completely unrelated to North Germanic Object Shift . This book questions this view and defends a unified analysis on the basis of strictly syntactic and phonological evidence. Given that its main conclusions are drawn from German data, it also sheds light on several problematic aspects of the grammar of this language, which have traditionally resisted a principled account. Prominent among these are: the inconsistent behaviour of German coherent infinitives with respect to extraction of their internal arguments; the existence of a less liberal type of Scrambling within topicalised VPs; the link between reordering possibilities and headfinalness; the asymmetry exhibited by monotransitive and ditransitive structures with respect to the interaction between Scrambling and the unmarked word order, and, finally, certain anomalies in the reordering of the lower arguments of ditransitive predicates that assign inherent case.Gema Chocano is the author of 'Narrow Syntax and Phonological Form: Scrambling in the Germanic languages (Linguistik Aktuell/ Linguistics Today)', published 2007 under ISBN 9789027233738 and ISBN 902723373X.