A minimalist approach to scrambling

This study tackles the challenges posed by scrambling languages to existing syntactic theories by examining how semantic and discourse functional factors interact with syntactic properties of word order, and the implications for Universal Grammar. It pursues three interconnected goals. First, it analyzes the syntactic structure of Persian, a language with free word order, addressing the relative order of categorized expressions, the motivations for their rearrangements, and the grammatical outcomes of such reorderings. A wide array of significant syntactic phenomena is explored, including object shift, Case, Extended Projection Principle (EPP), binding, and the scope interpretation of quantifiers, interrogative phrases, adverbial phrases, and negative elements. This monograph is the first major theoretical work on Persian, filling a gap in understanding its syntactic structure. The second goal links these insights to similar properties in other scrambling languages like German, Dutch, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, and Korean, enhancing comprehension of this diverse yet typologically related group. The final goal situates the findings within the Minimalist Program (MP), revealing that scrambling is not merely optional and that certain MP principles, such as the Minimal Link Condition, appear violated but are not. The study also questions the relevance of a typology of movement in natural language through careful analysis of scrambl