oa Woordvolgordevariatie: theorie versus empirie?

Word order variation: theory vs. empiricism?

In their chapter on word order variation in the middle field (scrambling), Broekhuis & Corver (2016) present a set of syntactic rules (generalizations) to derive word order patterns in Dutch. I will argue that their theoretical assumptions lead to the rejection of some sentences as being ungrammatical, while in my view they are perfectly grammatical. I conclude that it would be better to base grammaticality judgments on empirical data rather than on theoretical assumptions.