Syntactic and prosodic scrambling in Japanese

This paper presents evidence that Japanese has prosodic scrambling of phonological phrases (I center dot) in addition to the well-studied syntactic scrambling of XPs. All cases of scrambling in Japanese involve fronting constituents, be they syntactic XPs or phonological I center dot s. If the syntax cannot move XPs, the phonology is forced to move their prosodic equivalents: these I center dot s are fronted to the left edge of the intonational phrase (E (c)) that contains them and join to make a single recursive I center dot, the domain for tonal downstep (It and Mester 2012, 2013). Syntactic scrambling 'bleeds' prosodic scrambling, adding support for a uni-directional, feed-forward model of syntax-phonology interactions. Syntactic scrambling fronts XPs and obeys syntactic conditions on movement, and the scrambled XP exhibits interpretive effects in its surface position. Prosodic scrambling fronts I center dot s and is blind to syntactic conditions on movement, and the scrambled I center dot s are interpreted in situ, as expected.