On the Treatment of Scrambling and Adjunction in Minimalist Grammars1

Stabler (2001:258) suggested that “‘asymmetric’ feature checking” is among the mechanisms that “remain to be carefully explored” within his “minimalist grammars” framework. Our paper will undertake exactly this kind of exploration. Concretely, we are going to extend the “minimalist grammars” framework of Stabler (1997) (see also Harkema 2001; Michaelis 2001) by adding the operations adjoin and scramble. These are “asymmetric” counterparts of merge and move, respectively (Section 2). Subsequently, we will formulate our views on the treatment of scrambling and adjunction in German within this extended formalism (Section 3). Finally, we are going to address various linguistically motivated formal constraints on the resulting grammar (Section 4). Formal definitions are given in the Appendix (Section 5).