The Scrambling Paradox

It has been commonly observed that scrambling and wh-movement share sensitivity to strong movement constraints (Webelhuth 1989, Saito 1992, Bailyn 1995). At the same time, the two processes clearly differ in certain other respects, such as wh-island sensitivity, a finding that has inspired a range of analyses of scrambling as entirely distinct from better-understood movement processes (Müller and Sternefeld 1993, Bošković and Takahashi 1998, among many others). Careful comparison of Ā-scrambling and overt wh-movement in a language that shows both (Russian) reveals that this seemingly paradoxical behavior can be captured effectively in a probe-goal theory of scrambling that obeys a form of Relativized Minimality defined across feature classes, following Rizzi 2004. The resulting analysis exposes the distinct nature of strong and weak islands, with consequences for our understanding of the core architecture of syntactic movement.