The prosody of the extended VP

Abstract This paper investigates the syntax of vso and vos clauses in Mandar (Austronesian) by leveraging the prosody. This language allows free alternations between vso and vos orders, but phonotactic diagnostics reveal that vso strings are optimally parsed into tight prosodic constituents while vos strings are not. These results converge with syntactic diagnostics to show that vso orders arise from leftward movement of the verb while vos orders are generated through an additional step of rightward "Equation missing"-scrambling of the s . Targeted manipulations then reveal that phonological phrases can be built around substrings of arguments in the vso string, providing a new type of evidence for fine functional structure in the extended vp (Larson 1988). The prosodic parse of scrambled arguments, finally, shows that "Equation missing"-scrambling places its targets in adjunct positions (Chomsky 1993) in Mandar, setting up an account of scrambling that is grounded in the principle of Greed (Lasnik 1995).