Aspects of VP-internal scrambling: Evidence from Old English and Old Bulgarian
Aspects of VP-internal scrambling: Evidence from Old English and Old Bulgarian

Summary/Abstract: Within an integrated Minimalist mode of enquiry this paper seeks to provide an account of VPinternal Scrambling in OE and OB, the main assumption being that VP-internal Scrambling applies optionally to raise the internal Argument that is more closely related to the verb into a phrasally-adjoined position in the left periphery of VP ‘lower’. The grammaticality of the scrambled order has been claimed to be contingent upon factors such as focus, stress, weight, definiteness, morphological and discourse status, animacy, idiomaticity. This study aims to investigate the way the above factors contribute to the acceptability of post-VP scrambled object orders in OE and OB ditransitives with verbs of the give-class, as well as to investigate the way such factors interact to produce inverted object orders and the way they interfere with the general linearization principles in both languages.

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