Argument Scrambling within Urdu NPs

Clause-level discontinuity of NPs in different languages has been reported in the literature under different headings like discontinuity, extraposition, extraction, free topic, quantifier float and so on. However, discontinuity within the constituent-level, has only recently been noted (Raza, 2011) and is reported on in this paper. Urdu is a language in which both types of discontinuity, clause-level and constituent-level, have been found. In constituent-level discontinuous NPs, discontinuity occurs inside NPs at one structural position of a clause. In such phrases, the arguments of heads are non-contiguous to their respective heads inside NPs. The heads, however, cannot precede their arguments. This discontinuity and the constraints on the order of elements in NPs in Urdu pose a modeling problem. In contrast to what is usually assumed within ParGram (Butt et al., 1999; Dipper, 2003), a flat c-structure for Urdu NPs is therefore proposed and is modeled in the LFG framework.