The linear order of words and phrases is a major issue in syntax and subject to many crosslinguistic differences. In this course, we will focus on the linearisation of full-NP arguments on the clause level. While the relative order of the subject and object is typically rather strict in SVO languages (like English or French), SOV languages (like Japanese, Hindi or German) usually allow for more flexibility. We will look at factors determining the linearisation of arguments in languages allowing such flexibility – more specifically: the phenomenon called ‘scrambling’ in the syntactic literature (e.g. Haider & Rosengren 2003) – as well as phenomena that go along with it on several linguistic levels (ranging from core syntax over truth-conditional effects of different orderings to discourse structure). We will discuss empirical investigations of these effects and we will evaluate different theoretical models that try to capture them.
References: Haider, Hubert & Rosengren, Inger. 2003. Scrambling: Nontriggered Chain Formation in OV Languages. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 15(3). 203–267. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542703000291
- Kursleiter/in: Simon Masloch