Reviewed by Nina Rojina, University of Geneva

The volume contains selected articles from the international conference on Word Order and Scrambling (Tucson, Arizona, April 7–9, 2002). The fourteen articles in the volume address three major issues: (i) the semantic, syntactic, and discourse informational factors responsible for word order variations; (ii) the availability of scrambled constructions in second language (L2) and early first language (L1) acquisition; and (iii) the processing of word order variations. The first ten chapters deal with semantic, syntactic, and discourse informational properties of scrambling, whereas the final four chapters study the acquisition of scrambling.

Kenneth Hale, Eloise Jelinek, and MaryAnn Willie, ‘Topic and focus scope positions in Navajo’ (1–21), present an analysis of Navajo sentence structure and argue that Navajo is a pronominal argument and discourse configurational language. Katalin É. Kiss, ‘Argument scrambling, operator movement, and topic movement in Hungarian’ (22–43), analyzes Hungarian word order freedom and distinguishes three fields: (i) a postverbal argument field in which the order is determined by the specificity feature of arguments, (ii) an operator field that is determined semantically, and (iii) a topic field.

Mizuki Miyashita, Richard Demers, and Delbert Ortiz, ‘Grammatical relations in Tohono O’odham: An instrumental perspective’ (44–66), study the ambiguity of Tohono O’odham constructions that contain all third person arguments and suggest analyzing Tohono O’odham as a pronominal argument language. Veneeta Dayal, ‘Bare nominals: Non-specific and contrastive readings under scrambling’ (67–90), explores the validity of the generalization that the scrambling of indefinites results in the loss of nonspecific readings. She also investigates the status of contrastive readings and the relation of syntactic displacement to interpretation. Simin Karimi, ‘On object positions, specificity, and scrambling in Persian’ (91–124), analyzes the properties of Persian objects and distinguishes two object positions for specific and nonspecific objects, which accounts for the syntactic asymmetries between the two types of objects, and a third object position created by scrambling.

Jaklin Kornfilt, ‘Scrambling, subscrambling, and case in Turkish’ (125–55), discusses the relationship between scrambling out of larger determiner phrases (DPs; i.e. subscrambling) and the typology of case in Turkish. Furthermore, Kornfilt addresses the issues of specificity effect, condition on extraction domains, and incorporation. John Frederick Bailyn, ‘Does Russian scrambling exist?’ (156–76), argues against the existence of a uniform process of scrambling in Russian and suggests relating this phenomenon to the syntactic process of generalized inversion (i.e. A-scrambling) and dislocation (i.e. A´-scrambling).

Shigeru Miyagawa, ‘A-movement scrambling and options without optionality’ (177–200), argues that the A-scrambling of objects is driven by extended projection principle (EPP) and thus cannot be considered to be an instance of an optional operation. Helen de Hoop, ‘Scrambling in Dutch: Optionality and optimality’ (201–16), analyzes the scrambling behavior of definite objects in Dutch, which is not a feature driven phenomenon, and proposes an optimality theory analysis for studying the tendency of anaphoric definites to scramble. De Hoop also explains why scrambling does not affect the interpretation of sentences that contain anaphoric definites. Anoop Mahajan, ‘Word order and (remnant) VP movement’ (217–37), provides an analysis of subject-object-verb (SOV) and SVO languages by adopting Kayne’s (1994) antisymmetry approach and employing remnant verb phrase (VP) movement.

Vaijayanthi Sarma, ‘Non-canonical word order: Topic and focus in adult and child Tamil’ (238–72), argues that free word order in Tamil is a well-defined syntactic process with semantic consequences. Sarma also examines the availability of scrambled constructions in early L1 acquisition. Noriko Iwasaki, ‘L2 acquisition of Japanese: Knowledge and use of case particles in SVO and OSV sentences’ (273–300), focuses on the L2 acquisition of Japanese case particles in scrambled and nonscrambled constructions among English speakers. Irina A. Sekerina, ‘Scrambling and processing: Dependencies, complexity and constraints’ (301–24), studies the difference between scrambling and wh-movement and compares the processing complexity of scrambled sentences with those in canonical order. Angela D. Friederici, Matthias Schlesewsky, and Christian J. Fiebach, ‘Wh-movement versus scrambling: The brain makes a difference’ (325–44), compare wh-movement with scrambling in German by conducting a number of studies using event-related brain responses.

References

Kayne, Richard, S. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.