Narrow Syntax and Phonological Form: Scrambling in the Germanic languages(109 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.

Table of Contents:
1. Preface; 2. Chapter 1: Scrambling: A crosslinguistic perspective; 3. 1. Scrambling languages; 4. 2. Types of scrambling; 5. 3. Scrambling in the Germanic languages; 6. Chapter 2: A survey of some basic properties of German; 7. 1. The structure of the German clause; 8. 2. Coherent infinitival constructions; 9. 3. Remnant movement; 10. 4. The German pronominal system; 11. 5. Focus scrambling; 12. Chapter 3: Scrambling in German; 13. 1. German scrambling in rough syntax; 14. 1.1 The iterability of German scrambling; 15. 1.2 Scrambling within VP; 16. 1.3 Scrambling within other projections; 17. 1.4 Some preliminary conclusions about scrambable constituents; 18. 1.5 The clause-boundedness of scrambling and the syntactic position of scrambled constituents; 19. 1.6 'Island effects'; 20. 2. German scrambling at the interfaces; 21. 2.1 Phonological properties of scrambled elements; 22. 2.2 Semantic/pragmatic properties of scrambled elements; 23. 2.3 Tying the phonological and semantic/pragmatic constraints; 24. Chapter 4: Previous accounts of German scrambling; 25. 1. Movement approaches; 26. 1.1 Scrambling as 'move alpha' ('government and binding'); 27. 1.2 Scrambling as 'move' (the 'minimalist program'); 28. 2. Base-generation approaches; 29. 2.1 Base-generation, theta-role assignment, and case-checking at PF; 30. 2.2 Base-generation, theta-role assignment, and case-checking at LF; 31. 3. Conclusions; 32. Chapter 5: The phonological side of reordering processes; 33. 1. The phonological side of Scandinavian 'object shift'; 34. 1.1 Scandinavian 'object shift' from a descriptive perspective; 35. 1.2 Scandinavian 'object shift' in 'stylistic syntax'; 36. 1.3 Scandinavian 'object shift' in 'narrow syntax'; 37. 2. The phonological side of German scrambling; 38. 2.1 Evidence for DISL; 39. 2.2 Is German scrambling sensitive to 'phonological borders'?; 40. Chapter 6: Conclusions, problems, and pending issues; 41. Notes; 42. References; 43. Subject Index

Review :
This is a valuable piece of work that can be used as a reference book for an in-depth analysis of German data and theoretical accounts underlying them. The system proposed in this work to account for German scrambling and Object Schift is stimulating and inspiring, and opens up the floor to further discussions of word-order rearrangements in other languages. This is essential reading for anyone interested in ‘Scrambling’ and ‘Object Shift’. Drawing on a wide range of empirical evidence from German, Chocano provides syntactic and phonological evidence for the unification of these linguistic phenomena within a phase-based approach, with important consequences for many languages. Gema Chocano takes of on the daunting task attempting to explain problematic data involving Germanic scrambling such as the Freezing/Anti-freezing Paradox and Coherent Infinitives and through herefforts significantly expands our knowledge of the syntactic and phonological characteristics of this linguistic phenomenon with the aid of current minimalist theory. The arguments put forward in this book are intriguing and thought-provoking. To her credit, Chocano adopts a novel approach to Germanic scrambling and provides her readership with valuable new perspectives.This work will undoubtedly serve as a catalyst for discussion and research into Germanic scrambling and the interaction between the narrowsyntax and PF.