Japanese style scrambling in Russian. Myth and reality

Abstract

Long distance scrambling in Russian is not a well-understood phenomenon and a proper description of it is absent from the current literature. This thesis is an attempt to investigate the properties of long distance scrambling in Russian and compare the discovered facts to long distance scrambling in Japanese in the light of Boškoviæ and Takahashi’s (1998) description as well as to other displacement phenomena. In this study, I argue that Russian does not have semantically vacuous scrambling and give arguments that long distance scrambling in Russian involves focus movement. I show that scrambling in Russian is sensitive to relativized minimality and to other locality constraints. I observe that the structures most transparent for scrambling are clausal complements of perception verbs. In other syntactic contexts, scrambling is more restricted than it is generally assumed. I present evidence that scrambling and wh- movement pattern together with respect to locality constraints, informational backgrounds and successive cyclicity.