My dissertation examines the relationship between syntactic structure and pragmatic/contextual meaning of language focusing on the scrambling phenomena in German and Korean. I pursue this issue from the perspective that different ordering possibilities are motivated and constrained by interactions between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic principles of these languages. In particular, I utilize Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, Grimshaw 1995) to demonstrate how these principles interact and resolve conflicts among one another to yield the ``optimal'' output, i.e., a sentence with a particular word order, in a given context.

Taking the various scrambled variants of a sentence as competing candidates, I derive each scrambled structure as the best matching output to the given context, which is represented as the `information structure' (cf. Vallduvi 1992) in the input. In the first part of the talk, I propose that the Optimality-Theoretic account of scrambling, i.e., the search for the optimal syntactic structure in a given context, naturally leads to the explanations of the often-observed semantic and pragmatic effects associated with scrambling such as the `definiteness/specificity' effect (Moltmann 1990, de Hoop 1992), the `anti-focus' effect (Lenerz 1977, Abraham 1986, Webelhuth 1992), and the `contrastive focus' effect (Abraham 1986, Moltmann 1990). In the second part, I also argue that the OT account provides a systematic analysis of the problematic dual characteristic of the nun marking in Korean (cf. wa in Japanese), i.e., the dual function of marking topic and contrastive focus. Finally, the OT account I propose here also makes some predictions about the markedness of each scrambled variant, and this seems to match a statistical study of the frequency of some scrambled examples in real texts (Hoberg 1981).