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Browsing Languages, Linguistics and Academic Literacy by Subject "Afrikaans language--Syntax."

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    Scrambling in Afrikaans.
    (2012) Louw, Frederik Wilhelm.; Zeller, Jochen Klaus.
    ‘Scrambling’ languages allow arguments in a given sentence to be ordered in a variety of ways while leaving the grammatical roles of these arguments unchanged. West Germanic languages like German, Dutch, Yiddish, and West Flemish exhibit, to different extents, scrambling properties (Haider, 2006; Grewendorf, 2005; De Hoop, 2003). One well established assumption is that a prerequisite for scrambling is a rich (overt) case morphology: Grammatical relations need to be overtly marked on arguments in order for them to freely permute (Haider, 2006; Mahajan, 2003). Afrikaans, like other West Germanic languages, also allows a certain degree of flexibility (Molnárfi, 2002; Biberauer & Richards 2006; Conradie, 2007 Huddlestone, 2010). Generally, however, it is assumed to be much more rigid than a richly inflected language like German, in part because Afrikaans is the most morphologically ‘impoverished’ of all the West Germanic languages (Molnárfi, 2002; Biberauer & Richards, 2006; Huddlestone, 2010). In this thesis, I draw attention to certain double object constructions in Afrikaans that allow German-like flexibility without German-like morphology. Afrikaans allows the indirect and direct object of particular verbs to optionally invert their canonical order in finite embedded sentences without V-raising. I propose an analysis within a minimalist framework that accounts for the flexibility exhibited by these constructions.