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Binding and scrambling in Bangla
Abstract
Free word order phenomena in natural language is often attributed to a syntactic movement rule called Scrambling. Currently there is some controversy regarding the nature of this rule. According to the predominant view (Saito (1985), Webelhuth (1989)) Scrambling is A'-movement. According to the alternative view (Mahajan (1987, 1989b)) Scrambling is an instance of WH-movement. The former view is strongly justified by the fact that Scrambling shares a large number of properties with WH-movement (Webelhuth (1989)). The latter view is supported by the fact that Scrambling appears to be immume to weak crossovers effects, and that scrambled elements are able to license anaphors. This study is devoted to reconciling the claim that Scrambling is A'-movement with the aforementioned facts which seem to argue otherwise. A novel theory of binding is developed based on the assumption that both A- and A'-positions may license anaphors, and a novel approach to weak crossover phenomena based on Reinhart's Bound Pronoun Rule is proposed. Interestingly, the same notion of binding turns out to be the crucial element in each theory.
Subject Area
Linguistics|Asian literature
Recommended Citation
Sengupta, Gautam, "Binding and scrambling in Bangla" (1990). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9110212.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9110212