The Germanic languages and the SOV/SVO difference VII. Object Shift and Scrambling - An Introduction

Although they both place an object to the left of a sentential adverbial, Scandinavian Object Shift (OS) and continental West Germanic Scrambling (SCR) are normally treated as two different phenomena since they do not take place under exactly the same circumstances. In this introductory hand-out, I merely want to illustrate their properties and thus show that they are quite similar in what moves and which position movement can target, provided one considers the entire range of OS and SCR languages. The main difference between OS and SCR is that the former presupposes movement of the main verb whereas the latter does not. This property might be related to the contrast in basic verb placement, VO in Scandinavian vs. OV in the continental West Germanic languages.

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