Optimizing Structure in Context: Scrambling and Information Structure (review)

This book is a revised version of Choi's doctoral dissertation of the same title, with revisions mainly in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Using Optimality Theory (OT), Choi explores the phenomenon of "scrambling" in German and Korean—a representative characteristic of languages with free word order. Choi's book is an important contribution to understanding scrambling in the sense that it attempts to explain this phenomenon not within a commonly used framework such as Generative Grammar but within a grammatical framework of recent origin, that is, OT. Moreover, this book shows that OT also has an application for syntax and discourse in addition to phonology, in which this theory has found the most applicability.

Choi's book consists of six chapters. In the introduction, she makes clear why OT is the preferred linguistic theory for explaining scrambling in German and Korean, commenting that other current linguistic theories cannot neatly explain variation in languages with free word order because principles or rules in those theories are not violable. In contrast, however, constraints in OT are violable. Kager (1999), for example, discusses the central idea of OT such that surface forms of language are the result of conflict resolutions between competing constraints. A surface form is "optimal" in the sense that it induces the least serious violations of a set of violable constraints, ranked in a language-specific hierarchy. Constraints are universal, and languages differ in the ranking of constraints, giving preferences to some constraints over others.

In addition, Choi opposes any approach using only one module to explain scrambling within grammar, such as a semantic, syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, or prosodically motivated approach. She argues that scrambling involves all these different components of grammar and occurs as a result of the interactions of these modules, rather than as a result of the operation by any one singular module (p. 3).

Chapter 2 deals with phrase structure and configurationality in German and Korean. Choi takes the position that both German and Korean have configurational structures in the sense that they have a VP projection which structurally differentiates between subject and non-subject arguments. In terms of the canonical structure in German and Korean, Choi proposes the following configurational S structure, that is, [S Subject [VP I.Object D.Object V]], which is solely determined by "grammatical" information. This canonical structure over other scrambled structures is induced by the constraint, CANON (CN1 and CN2), which controls the mapping between the grammatical functional information and the constituent structure.

It should be noted, however, that the debate about configurationality in German word order is still unresolved; for example, according to Abraham and de Meij (1986), German is strongly nonconfigurational, at least as far as the middle field is concerned. Abraham claims that while the subject-NPs, objects, and PPs exhibit a preferred order constrained solely by the distribution of focus, the prepositional object, for which the verb is subcategorized, has an obvious, inseparable position next to the verb. Therefore, he proposes split configurationality in German: V0 can be defined in structural terms, [PO, V], while the rest of the middle field is strongly affected by the distribution of accent ([+Focus]).

Choi considers for her analysis mainly the ditransitive VP in German, for example, dem/einem Mann das/ein Buch gegeben hat (gave the/a man the/a book). It might be worthwhile, though, to examine other types of VPs in order to determine whether they also behave in the same way as the ditransitive VP in terms of scrambling.

Moreover, the issue of the canonical structure in German and Korean is also controversial. According to Choi, the indirect object precedes the direct object in the canonical structure in both languages, and scrambling is a derivational operation from this structure, which is optional. Miyagawa (1997), in contrast, argues that for VP-internal word order permutation, the two word orders IO-DO and DO-IO should be considered as being base-generated instead of as...