Pangasinan (Austronesian; northern Philippines) has case marking and some agreement and generally free postverbal word order. However, in a particular, limited configuration where case and agreement fail to disambiguate between core arguments, their word order becomes rigid. We argue that these facts are explained by a feature-driven approach to scrambling, where scrambling probes can only target morphosyntactic features and not A’-features. This work shows that the well-known trade-off between word order rigidity and overt case/agreement is not merely a typological tendency, but can also be observed in an individual’s synchronic grammar.

Keywords: Austronesian Pangasinan Austronesian voice probing locality scrambling word order disambiguation syntax hidden