In this book, Hinterholzl provides a comprehensive study of three salient phenomena of West Germanic, namely scrambling, remnant movement and restructuring, and discusses their interrelatedness. In particular, restructuring is shown to break down into remnant movement of the major phases of the infinitival clause, accounting for the formation of verb clusters, and the transparency of restructuring infinitives.

Languages with free word orders pose daunting challenges to linguistic theory because they raise questions about the nature of grammatical strings. Ross, who coined the term Scrambling to refer to the relatively ‘free’ word orders found in Germanic languages (among others) notes that “… the problems involved in specifying exactly the subset of the strings which will be generated … are far too complicated for me to even mention here, let alone come to grips with” (1967:52). This book offers a radical re-analysis of middle field Scrambling.

This volume collects the recent published articles of Guglielmo Cinque of the University of Venice, one of the world's top linguists. The book is divided into two sections, the first on restructuring, a central topic in Romance syntax and with connections to other language groups as well. The second part focuses on the consequences of treating clausal functional heads as members of a universal hierarchy in the domain of morphpsyntax, offering a new perspective on many intricate problems arising in a variety of natural languages.

This volume presents a detailed analysis of West Germanic scrambling from the perspective of recent versions of the ‘Minimalist Program’, especially the one advanced in Chomsky’s (2001). It refutes the commonly held view that scrambled structures in West Germanic languages are the result of a phenomenon completely unrelated to North Germanic ‘Object Shift’.

This monograph is written from a specific perspective on the scientific study of language, a position that holds that linguistic theory must be held accountable to the diversity of the world’s languages. In this view, theoretical hypotheses about the nature of language, whether synchronic or diachronic, must be tested against a wide range of languages and language types. This position entails what Ken Hale has called the “the confirmatory function of linguistic diversity” (Hale 2000: 168).