Scrambled objects and case marking in Mandarin Chinese

In this paper, the differential marking of scrambled objects in Chinese is examined within an OT Syntactic framework. The sometimes optional, sometimes obligatory case marking of scrambled objects is explained in terms of aligned prominence scales of animacy and grammatical function on the one hand, and aligned prominence scales of definiteness and syntactic position on the other. The influence of syntactic position included, Chinese can be argued to have a three-dimensional DOM-pattern.