Scrambling — What’s the State of the Art?

Anything goes still appears to be the adequate motto summarizing the present stage of the theoretical debate on scrambling. All options available in the theory of grammar have been exploited for the reconstruction of this phenomenon, that is the variable constituent order within a clause in languages like German, Hindi, or Japanese, to name just a few. Consensus about what the correct overarching theory of scrambling is has not been reached however. Even for one and the same language, various analyses are still in competition. Given this situation, why is this so? There are two possible answers: Either the phenomenon is still not sufficiently understood or the present theories are not fully adequate for capturing it.1

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