Cartographic “explanations” need explanations themselves

Abstract

Abstract This chapter offers a conceptual and empirical criticism of phrasal movements in cartographic syntax. The chapter argues that present-day approaches to generative syntax warrant the assumption that core aspects of cartographic syntax do not match current conceptual aims. Also, cartographic analyses sometimes struggle to represent certain types of findings, as the chapter illustrates for the case of German scrambling. An alternative, relational, type of analyses is shown to yield better results for the description and explanation of scrambling—and to avoid the conceptual issues of cartography, since it bases only on conceptually necessary relations, rather than cartographic cascades of positions.