Scrambling and Acceptability in Korean

This brief paper treats scrambling and its resulting variations of acceptability in Korean. In general, the structure of a sentence can be defined in terms of hierarchical and syntagmatic relations which can be changed by scrambling procedure. Syntagmatic relation involves the relative precedence and adjacency relations of the constituents in a sentence. So it can be said that scrambling affects the precedence and adjacency relations of the constituents. All possible sentences generated by scramb1ing within the syntactic islands are regarded as acceptable by native speakers, but their degrees of acceptability are so different that we can calculate them in terms of their degrees of deviance from the basic word-order sentence. And these degrees of deviance are identified as those of syntagmatic relations, that is, precedence and adjacency