Scrambling and operator movement

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate that what appears to be an instance of overt operator movement in Japanese in fact involves the operation of scrambling. It is shown that such an instance of overt operator movement shares with scrambling the property that it is insensitive to the wh-island. On the basis of this fact, I argue that such movement is analyzed as resulting from scrambling of the target phrase and then assigning the feature [Focus] to it, a feature that establishes an operator-variable chain. Furthermore, I argue that the present hypothesis is motivated by the phenomena of what Takano (2002) calls “surprising constituents,” whose presence in Japanese can be attributed to that of multiple scrambling. I suggest that the reason why scrambling is involved in an apparent instance of overt operator movement in Japanese comes from the defectiveness of functional categories, following Fukui (1986).