Some notes on word order and interpretation in Dutch and Finnish

Abstract

Dutch is typically known to allow scrambling. Finnish on the other hand has a flexible word order. Even though the two languages differ in many aspects and Finnish does not have scrambling in the sense of an alternation between an adverb and an object, we suggest that the relation between word order and interpretation observed in the two languages is similar. On the basis of new empirical data from Finnish, we show that in both Dutch and Finnish movement of the direct object from its base-position to a noncanonical position in the middle field is related to discourse anaphoricity