Object shift and object scrambling in Germanic
Hans Broekhuis
November 2022 

The literature often makes a terminological distinction between object shift and object scrambling in case of leftward object movement in the Scandinavian and the continental West-Germanic languages, respectively. This reflects the theoretical claim originating from the 1980’s that we are dealing with two different syntactic rules. It has become increasingly clear, however, that the notion of scrambling is used as an umbrella term for different kinds of movement. This review will show that there are good reasons for assuming that object shift and one specific kind of scrambling can be characterized as A-movement of the object(s) triggered by structural case features. This motivates a revaluation of the data that led to the earlier conclusion that object shift and scrambling behave differently with respect to Holmberg’s generalization, as well as a discussion of the linguistic nature of this generalization.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006444 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in The Oxford Encyclopedia of (Germanic) Linguistics
keywords:	object shift, scrambling, a-movement, information structure, holmberg’s generalization, language variation, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [August 2022] v1 [February 2022]
Downloaded:	469 times

 

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