Local Scrambling, Specificity and EPP-feature-driven Movement

It has been known that local scrambling has three properties: A-movement property, A -movement property and specificity. A-movement properties of local scrambling are manifested in binding of anaphora and idiom chunks. The A -movement property of local scrambling can be captured by anaphora preposing and reconstruction effects. According to Diesing (1997), Neeleman and Reinhart (1998), Lee and Cho (2003), Karimi (2005), and others, scrambling is also associated with specificity. In this paper, I ll show that if we assume the existence of RefP (Stowell and Beghelli 1994, Kiss 1996), the three properties of scrambling can be consistently accounted for. It is assumed in this paper that the abstract Ref head of RefP has a specificity feature, which enters into Agree with the specificity-feature of the goal. The specificity feature can have as its subfeature the generalized EPP-feature, which attracts the goal of Agree, a specific element, to [Spec, RefP]. After all, local scrambling consists of a two-step process: EPP-feature-driven movement to [Spec, TP] and specificity (EPP)-feature-driven movement to [Spec, RefP].