Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the most important descriptive issues involved in the so-called Object Shift (henceforth OS) and Scrambling constructions, and to discuss some of the theoretical implications of the facts. There is an extensive literature on these constructions, written in a number of different frameworks and arguing for quite different analyses. For reasons of space I will concentrate on facts from Germanic languages in the descriptive part of the chapter, mainly the Scandinavian languages for OS, and German and Dutch for Scrambling. Since most of the literature on these constructions assumes derivational accounts and movement rules (see e.g. the papers in Grewendorf and Sternefeld 1990b, Corver and Riemsdijk 1994b), I will basically assume that kind of analysis in the presentation of the data. I will, however, try to save most of the theoretical issues for the second half of the chapter and make an attempt to keep the first half relatively descriptive and theory-neutral in order to give the reader a reasonable overview. The relevant constructions are exemplified in (1b) and (2b) (where t i indicates trace in the position where the “moved” object is generally assumed to have been base generated): (1)   a. Nemandinn las   ekki bókina. (Ic) student-the read  not book-the b. Nemandinn las bókinai ekki t i “The student didn't read the book.” ... log in or subscribe to read full text