Scrambling (linguistics)

Scrambling is a common term for pragmatic word order. In the Chomskyan tradition, every language is assumed to have a basic word order which is fundamental to its sentence structure, so languages which exhibit a wide variety of different orders are said to have "scrambled" them from their "normal" word order. The notion of scrambling has spread beyond the Chomskyan tradition and become a general concept that denotes many non-canonical word orders in numerous languages. Scrambling often (but not always) results in a discontinuity; the scrambled expression appears at a distance from its head in such a manner that crossing lines are present in the syntactic tree. Scrambling discontinuities are distinct from topicalization, wh-fronting, and extraposition discontinuities. Scrambling does not occur in English, but it is frequent in languages with freer word order, such as German, Russian, Persian and Turkic languages.

The following examples from German illustrate typical instances of scrambling:

These examples illustrate typical cases of scrambling in the midfield of a subordinate clause in German. All six clauses are acceptable, whereby the actual order that appears is determined by pragmatic considerations such as emphasis. If one takes the first clause (clause a) as the basic order, then scrambling has occurred in clauses b–f. The three constituents der Mann, der Frau, and die Bohnen have been scrambled.

Scrambling in German is associated with the midfield, i.e. the part of the sentence that appears between the finite verb and a non-finite verb in main clauses and between the subordinator (= subordinating conjunction) and the finite verb in an embedded clause (= subordinate clause). There is a clear tendency for definite pronouns to appear to the left in the midfield. In this regard, definite pronouns are frequent candidates to undergo scrambling, e.g.

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