WORD ORDER AND SCOPE: TRANSPARENT INTERFACES AND THE SIGNATURE*

In this paper, we argue for three inter-related conclusions (which we will make more precise below): i. There exist 'soft ' constraints (economy conditions) that value a particular type of correspondence between LF and PF representations (for example, scope at LF matched by precedence at PF). ii. These constraints are uni-directional: LF (broadly construed) is calculated first, and determines PF (surface word order). iii. Scope rigidity (the apparent absence of QR) is not a property of languages, but of specific configurations, and the distribution of rigidity effects is (largely) predictable from independent variation in the syntactic resources of various languages (e.g., possibilities for scrambling). There is no ±QR parameter. Conclusion (i) has been suggested often in the literature under a variety of names. It is in concert with assumption (ii) that we part ways with much of the existing literature. We argue that this combination of assumptions yields a 'signature effect', which we call the 3/4 signature. Taking one LF property (A scopes over or under B) and one PF property (