This section has discussed A'-scrambling, which involves negation, focus and topic movement. We have seen that there are reasons to assume that negative phrases expressing sentence negation are obligatorily moved into the specifier position of the functional projection NegP, from where they can take scope over the proposition expressed by the lexical domain of the clause. Similarly, contrastive foci and topics are obligatorily moved into the specifier position of FocP and TopP, from where they can take scope over their associated backgrounds/comments. The fact that contrastive foci are often higher in the structure than phrases expressing sentence negation, while contrastive topics are higher than contrastive foci leads to the overall structure in (182), in which the brackets without labels stand for potential functional projections that may be discovered by future research.

The representation in (182) is strikingly similar to what we find in languages such as Hungarian, which are strongly templatic in the sense that there is a strict order of phrases of different semantic types: topic > focus > neg. It is therefore not surprising that the description of the Hungarian functional domain given in É.Kiss (2002) is essentially similar to that given in (182), although it adds a functional projection between TopP and FocP that provides a landing site for certain quantified expressions, especially those involving a universal quantifier or a numeral expression such as sokmany, számosseveral and több mintmore than. We might therefore expect that such phrases will also undergo A'-movement in languages other than Hungarian: although Svenonius (2000) and Christensen (2005) have shown that this expectation is indeed borne out for Icelandic, it remains to be shown for Dutch. Although further comparisons of Dutch and Hungarian are needed to get a more complete picture of the similarities and differences between these languages, the fact that the functional domain of the clause is so similar in unrelated languages like Dutch and Hungarian lends credibility to the hypothesis that this domain is at least partly determined by certain universal (perhaps semantic) properties of the language system.