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Description:
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"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.
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