Prosody of Scrambling *

The interaction between prosody and word order has been of significant cross-linguistic interest in generative linguistics (Vallduvi 1992, Cinque 1993, Selkirk1995, Zubizarreta 1998, Reinhart 2006, Büring 2007, i.a.). In Slavic languages, which exhibit significant freedom of word order (Bailyn 1995 and many others) the effects of prosody on word order permutations, known as scrambling, have received limited attention. Although a number of studies refer to the role of intonation, stress, or focusing on the sentence interpretation, oftentimes these claims are based on the authors‟ intuition and are not supported by experimental results. Recent advances in experimental methods have prompted emergence of research based on solid empirical data from Slavic languages (see Zybatow & Mehlhorn 2000, Kallestinova 2007, Féry, Paslawska & Fanselow 2007); nevertheless, studies directly addressing correlation of scrambling and prosody in various Slavic languages are scarce.