Topicality and anaphoricity in Dutch scrambling

Abstract Direct objects in Dutch can precede or follow adverbs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as scrambling . The linguistic literature agrees in its assumption that scrambling is regulated by the topicality and anaphoricity status of definite objects, but theories vary as to what kinds of objects exactly are predicted to scramble. This study reports experimental data from a sentence completion experiment with adult native speakers of Dutch, showing that topics are scrambled more often than foci, and that anaphoric objects are scrambled more often than non-anaphoric objects. However, while... Mehr ...