Minimalism and free constituent order (in Russian as Compared to German)
Peter Kosta · publish.UP (University of Potsdam) · 2002
The present paper deals with an analysis of Russian as so-called free word order language. The strategies of long scrambling constructions in Russian are compared to the so-called midrange scrambling in German. We consider long scrambling not as A-bar-movement (free adjunction to an XP-category) but as the attraction type of movement of arguments triggered by the Minimal link condition (Chomsky 1995). Free word order languages such as Russian (and to some extent German) have strong D-features on T but weak on V. We consider the approach as presented in Fanselow (1996) as adequate also for our model.