Rightward Scrambling as Rightward Remnant Movement

Mahajan (1997) and Simpson and Bhattacharya (2003) analyze Indo- Aryan languages such as Hindi-Urdu and Bangla as SVO. We argue against this position, drawing on rightward scrambling in Hindi-Urdu to make this point. We propose an account of the phenomenon in terms of rightward remnant-VP movement. This account differs from proposals that posit rightward movement of individual arguments as well as from the antisymmetric proposals mentioned above, which treat rightward scrambling as argument stranding. Our rightward remnant movement analysis better captures two empirical properties of rightward scrambling that remain elusive in the other accounts: the correlation between linear order and scope, and restricted scope for rightwardscrambled wh-expressions.