Scrambling (linguistics) - Further Examples

Further Examples

Standard instances of scrambling in German occur in the midfield, as stated above. There are, however, many non-canonical orderings where the displaced constituents do not appear in the midfield. One can argue that such examples also involve scrambling, e.g.

Erwähnt	hat	er	das	nicht.
mentioned	has	he	that	not	'He didn't mention that.'

The past participle erwähnt has been topicalized in this sentence. Its object, the pronoun das, appears, however, on the other side of the finite verb. There is no midfield involved in this case, which means the non-canonical position in which das appears in relation to its governor erwähnt cannot be addressed in terms of midfield scrambling. The position of das also cannot be addressed in terms of extraposition, since extraposed constituents are relatively heavy, much heavier than das, which is a very light definite pronoun. Given these facts, one can argue that a scrambling discontinuity is present. The definite pronoun das has been scrambled rightward out from under its governor erwähnt. Hence the example suggests that the scrambling mechanism is quite flexible.

Scrambling is like extraposition (but unlike topicalization and wh-fronting) in a relevant respect; it is clause-bound. That is, one cannot scramble a constituent out of one clause into another, e.g.

Sie	hat	gesagt,	dass	wir	das	machen	sollten.
she	has	said	that	we	that	do	should	'She said that we should do that.'
*Sie	hat	das	gesagt,	dass	wir	machen	sollten.
she	has	that	said,	that	we	do	should

The first example has canonical word order; scrambling has not occurred. The second example illustrates what happens when one attempts to scramble the definite pronoun das out of the embedded clause into the main clause. The sentence becomes strongly unacceptable. Extraposition is similar. When one attempts to extrapose a constituent out of one clause into another, the result is unacceptable.