Scrambling (linguistics)
Scrambling is a common term for pragmatic word order. In the Chomskyan tradition, word orders of all languages are taken to be derived from a common source with a fundamental word order, so languages which do not follow a set pattern can be said to be "scrambled" from "normal" word order. The notion of scrambling has spread beyond the Chomskyan tradition and become a general concept that denotes many non-canonical word orders in numerous languages. Scrambling often (but not always) results in a discontinuity; the scrambled expression appears at a distance from its head in such a manner that crossing lines are present in the syntactic tree. Scrambling discontinuities are distinct from topicalization, wh-fronting, and extraposition discontinuities. Scrambling does not occur in English, but it is frequent in languages with freer word order, such as German, Russian and Persian.
Read more about Scrambling (linguistics): Examples, Further Examples, Scrambling Within A Constituent, Theoretical Analyses, See Also
Famous quotes containing the word scrambling:
“He appeared to be a very religious man, and said his prayers in a loud voice, in Indian, kneeling before the camp, morning and evening,—sometimes scrambling up again in haste when he had forgotten this, and saying them with great rapidity. In the course of the day, he remarked, not very originally, “Poor man rememberum God more than rich.””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)