Narrow Syntax and Phonological Form
Subtitle: Scrambling in the Germanic languages (Linguistik Aktuell/ Linguistics Today)
Edition: 109 edition
Publisher: John Benjamins Pub Co
Published: May 16, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 333
ISBN-13: 9789027233738
Subjects: Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure; German; Foreign Language Study; Germanic languages; Phonology; Syntax; Word order; Germanic & Scandinavian languages; Language
Description: "'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."--Jacket.