A-Scrambling Exists!

The nature of scrambling is a focus of recent debate in the syntactic literature. The term scrambling is used to describe apparently optional permutations of word order, found especially in languages with extensive case-marking. Saito (1989) argues that scrambling is A-bar movement (like wh-movement), rather than A-movement (like movement to the subject position). Webelhuth (1989) argues for scrambling to positions with mixed Aand A-bar properties, while Mahajan (1990) counters that local (clause-internal) scrambling can be either to an Aor an A-bar position, while long-distance scrambling is A-bar movement. In a recently published paper, Frank, Lee & Rambow (FLR; 1996) take a careful look at different types of evidence for the kind of movement involved in scrambling in German and Korean. They conclude that there is no A-scrambling, and that scrambling is actually a special kind of A-bar movement that can affect binding relations in some languages. However, there is good reason to reconsider the evidence against A-scrambling, and to maintain the strong hypothesis that there are only (at most) three types of syntactic movement—A-, A-bar, and head movement. The central argument to be presented here is based on examples like the Georgian ones below. Suppose that local scrambling can be A-movement, as Mahajan (1990) suggests. Like other types of A-movement, local scrambling can create new binding relations. Thus, although the unscrambled object in (1a) cannot bind a possessive anaphor embedded in the subject, the scrambled object in (1b) can. On the other hand, some binding relations cannot be created by scrambling. For example, the subject anaphor in (2) cannot be bound by either an unscrambled object (2a) or a scrambled one (2b).