Building information structure

The proposed research attempts to review conceptual and empirical issues in the domain of word order variation as a result of scrambling processes.The aim of the project is to identify and exploit those aspects of the syntax-prosody and syntax-discourse interface which allow to address the issue of optionality in a coherent syntactic theory of word order variation. We explore the possibility that word order is driven by prosody: features of the peripheral system may encode instructions to both the core computational component and the interface levels that are linked to prosodic and information structure. Optionality of movement falls out as a consequence of lexicalizing either the head or the tail position in the scrambling chain.