For a long time, scrambling has been thought to be a uniform phenomenon. Recent research, however, has shown that we should distinguish at least two main types: A-scrambling, which is restricted to nominal arguments, and A'-scrambling, which can also be applied to other categories and non-arguments. A-scrambling has been discussed in Section 13.2, and A'-scrambling will be discussed in this section.

Section 11.3 has discussed various types of A'-movement involved in the formation of wh-questions, relative clauses, °topicalization constructions, etc. These so-called wh-movements differ from the A'-movements to be discussed in this section in their choice of landing site: whereas wh-movement targets the clause-initial position (the specifier of CP), the movements in this section target some position in the middle field of the clause. It is often assumed that the positions targeted by A'-scrambling are the specifier positions of various functional projections in the functional domain of the clause, indicated by XP in structure (80).

Since this section focuses on the various functional projections external to vP, we will often represent vP part of the structure as [LD ... V ...], where “LD” stands for “lexical domain”. This allows us to simplify the representations and to suppress certain issues that are not immediately relevant to our discussion, such as the fact that in (in)transitive constructions the specifier position of vP is occupied by a trace of a moved subject.

Section 11.3 has argued that the various subtypes of wh-movement are semantically motivated: e.g. wh-movement in wh-questions is necessary because it derives an operator-variable chain in the sense of predicate calculus. The same is arguably true for the various subtypes of A'-scrambling discussed in this section. For instance, example (81a) shows that negative phrases expressing sentence negation are obligatorily scrambled, which can be semantically motivated by saying that this is necessary for the negation expressed by these phrases to take scope over the proposition expressed by the clause; cf. Haegeman (1995). Representation (81b) formally expresses this by assuming that the lexical domain of the clause is embedded in a NegP, whose specifier provides a landing site for the negative phrase; cf. Section 13.3.1 for a detailed discussion.

A similar approach can be taken for so-called focus and topic movement, discussed in Section 13.3.2. Neeleman & Van de Koot (2008) argues that focus movement is instrumental in distinguishing contrastive foci from the backgrounds against which they are evaluated, while topic movement is instrumental in distinguishing contrastive topics from the comments that provide more information about them. This can be formally expressed as in (82): the contrastive focus/topic is moved into the specifier of a Foc(us)P/Top(ic)P, which embeds the lexical domain of the clause acting as the background/comment. Note that contrastive foci are indicated by small caps in italics, contrastive topics by italics plus a double underline.

The three subtypes of A'-scrambling mentioned above will be discussed in the following sections. But first, a note of caution: research on these types of scrambling is still in its infancy, and many issues have yet to be resolved. For example, while it seems to be widely accepted that negation movement is obligatory in Dutch, it is controversial whether the same is true for focus and topic movement.