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Dutch scrambling and the nature of discourse templates

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Abstract

The so-called cartographic approach to discourse-related word-order variation is based on the idea that particular interpretations—say, contrastive focus—are licensed in the specifier of particular functional projections—say, a focus phrase. In this paper we present arguments against this view based on scrambling in Dutch. We discuss a range of implementations of the cartographic approach and show that they are either too weak, in that they cannot generate all the word orders found in Dutch, or too strong, in that they fail to capture restrictions on scrambling. The alternative we present dispenses with discourse-related functional projections and instead relies on mapping rules that associate syntactic representations with representations in information structure. On this view, scrambling operations derive a syntactic configuration that matches the structural description of a mapping rule that could otherwise not apply. We suggest that it is this interface effect that licenses the marked structures created by scrambling.

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  1. UCL Linguistics, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London, WC1N 1PF, UK

    Ad Neeleman & Hans van de Koot

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  1. Ad Neeleman
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Correspondence to Ad Neeleman.

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This paper is dedicated to the memory of Tanya Reinhart.

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Neeleman, A., van de Koot, H. Dutch scrambling and the nature of discourse templates. J Comp German Linguistics 11, 137–189 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-008-9018-0

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