Scrambling to the Edge

• Published in: Syntax (Oxford, England) Vol. 13; no. 2; pp. 133 - 164
• Main Author: Hiraiwa, Ken
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2010
• Subjects: Binding; Constraints; Grammar Theories; Grammatical subject; Japanese; Japanese language; Movement; Phases; Syntactic Analysis; Syntactic phases; Syntax; Topics; Word order
• ISSN: 1368-0005; 1467-9612
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9612.2009.00135.x

.  It has been well known since Saito 1989 that scrambling in Japanese is subject to the Proper Binding Condition (PBC; see Fiengo 1977). As I will show, remnant movement in Japanese is heavily constrained, and in fact, no remnants created by scrambling or topicalization can be moved over extracted elements. This article argues that the alleged cases for the PBC in Japanese should be reconsidered in favor of elimination of the PBC, and its effects should be derived from the architecture of the narrow syntax: interactions between Cyclic Multiple Spell‐Out, the Phase Impenetrability Condition, and a refined mechanism of probing. Specifically, I argue that scrambling in Japanese uniformly targets the edge of a phase. Under this theory, ‘‘remnant movement’’ just reduces to an artifact, and it follows that there is no special constraint on remnant movement per se. I will demonstrate that my theory brings significant new empirical advantages and that the same mechanism provides a unified account for various unexplained constraints on scrambling.