Scrambling and the Survive Principle
| Carson-Newman College
Languages with free word orders pose daunting challenges to linguistic theory because they raise questions about the nature of grammatical strings. Ross, who coined the term Scrambling to refer to the relatively ‘free’ word orders found in Germanic languages (among others) notes that “… the problems involved in specifying exactly the subset of the strings which will be generated … are far too complicated for me to even mention here, let alone come to grips with” (1967:52). This book offers a radical re-analysis of middle field Scrambling. It argues that Scrambling is a concatenation effect, as described in Stroik’s (1999, 2000, 2007) Survive analysis of minimalist syntax, driven by an interpretable referentiality feature [Ref] to the middle field, where syntactically encoded features for temporality and other world indices are checked. The purpose of this book is to investigate the syntactic properties of middle field Scrambling in synchronic West Germanic languages, and to explore, to what possible extent we can classify Scrambling as a ‘syntactic phenomenon’ within Survive-minimalist desiderata.
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 115] 2007. x, 216 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
Preface
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vii–viii
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Acknowledgements
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ix–x
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Chapter 1: Introduction
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1–45
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Chapter 2: Properties of scrambling
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46–94
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Chapter 3: Theoretical considerations
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95–144
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Chapter 4: The prosodic side of scrambling
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145–188
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Chapter 5: Conclusion
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189–200
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Bibliography
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201–213
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Index
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214–217
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“While taking the full range of semantic, pragmatic and prosodic properties of West-Germanic scrambling phenomena into account, Michael Putnam presents a compelling argument in support of a narrow syntactic treatment of middle field word order variation, advancing the minimalist program in a surprising and conceptually appealing way.”
C.Jan-Wouter Zwart, University of Groningen
Cited by
Cited by 6 other publications
ACUÑA-FARIÑA, JUAN CARLOS
Hein, Johannes & Andrew Murphy
Putnam, Michael T.
Putnam, Michael T.
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Subjects
BIC Subject: CFK – Grammar, syntax
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General