This thesis provides an analysis of scrambling, following the Minimalist program of Chomsky 1992, examining Hindi as a case study and occasionally making comparisons with Japanese. The first major claim is that there are two kinds of operations that yield scrambling. One type, called Outer scrambling, is an Operator-Variable construction and is the result of movement. The other type, called Inner scrambling, is the result of several conspiring factors that allow permutation without movement. These factors are triggered by (i) the strength feature of functional heads (ii) Economy principles that hold at phonological form and (iii) Full Interpretation, which causes the Agr structure to be deleted after its agreement relations have been established. These factors cause TnsP to collapse into an N-ary branching structure containing the arguments of the verb. It is assumed that linear order is not fixed until Spellout. Therefore, the N-ary branching structure is free to yield permutations wi...

A verb second (V2) construction is one in which the verb (by rule) appears directly after the first constituent. In this paper I propose to describe V2 as the positional marking of a dependency relation. The approach assumes that there is only one structure generating procedure in syntax, which