Scrambling (linguistics)

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Scrambling is the variation of the order of words in a sentence in a language in which word order is not fixed. The term originated with the Chomskian tradition of Transformational Grammar, wherein word order in all languages is taken to be derived from a common source with a fundamental word order.

[edit] Scrambling Languages

Many languages from the Australian, Papuan and Austronesian language families have word order that is determined by pragmatic considerations, such as topic or focus, rather than by the grammatical roles of the constituents, as partly determines word order in English and many other Indo-European Languages.

Languages that have pragmatically determined word order are generally either head-marking or dependent-marking languages. Head-marking means that the syntax marks the head of a node, that is, the verb in a clause, as to the respective role of the dependents, in this case, the subject and object nouns or noun phrases. This generally means that a verb in a head-marking language will have prefixes or affixes to reference the subject and possibly the object as well. A dependent-marking language marks the nouns or noun phrases as to their roles with respect to the verb. This is usually done with case.

[edit] Examples

Wagiman is a language from the far-north of Australia that has variable word order. A sentence such as the following may take a number of configurations.

gayh-yi lamarra-yi ngan-badi-na borndedi-laying

that-erg dog-erg 3sgA.1sgO-bite-pst knee-loc

'that dog bit me on the knee'

This sentence contains three key consituents, 'that dog', 'bit me' and 'on the knee', there is also the option of an additional free pronoun, nganung 'me'. These constituents may occur in any order without any effect on the propositional content of the clause.

This is so, because Wagiman marks grammatical relations both with verbal prefixes ngan- 'he/she/it did something to me', and with case suffixes on nominals, as in the -yi suffix, denoting ergative case or, the agent of the verb; the person or thing that performed the event.

While word order is referred to as 'free' in languages such as Wagiman, it is more accurate to say that the order of words is determined by factors other than the grammatical roles of sentential constituents.