A (Purely) Derivational Approach to Russian Scrambling*

Progrsss in Linguistics is often made by applying results from one area to a different domain of inquiry. In this articles, I bring together three distinct ideas, independently proposed in the literature in three distinct domains, and show that when taken together, they shed significant light on the properties of Russian scrambling and on word order freedom in general. By bringing together these three ideas, we can answer the major questions about "scrambling": is it optional and why does it have the properties it does in particular configurations? As background I assume that Russian canonical word order is SVO, and Japanese SOV, and that local reorderings, such as Japanese (1b) and longdistance reordering (such as (2b)), are derived from (1a) and (2a) respectively by a movement transformation.