INVESTIGATING SCRAMBLING IN SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE OF URDU

Abstract

Scrambling refers to the displacement of constituents from their canonical positions without altering core grammatical relations. This study investigates the scrambling within the syntactic structure of Urdu language within the theoratical framework of Minimalist Program, focusing on argument dislocation and the locality of movement. As a native speaker of Urdu, the researcher compiled a corpus of approximately 1500 naturally occurring sentences through purposive sampling of informal spoken discourse. Researcher selected 30 sentences from this dataset purposively for detailed syntactic analysis based on the presence of no canonical word order and constituent displacement. The findings reveal that scrambling in Urdu is a phase-bound, interface-convergent operation, and successive cyclic regulated by the phase heads C⁰ and v⁰. requiring no additional projections such as AgroP, or other external factors. Movement is driven solely with core syntactic operations —  Merge and Move —  within the CP and VP domains. This argues, scrambling in Urdu is not an optional surface phenomenon but reflects universal computational principles of grammar. These results challenge antisymmetric and derived-SOV analysis, offering empirical support for a fully phase-driven model of displacement and underscoring the autonomy of syntactic computation in determining surface word order.