I explore a new approach to flexible word order in Japanese and its effects on interpretation. Specifically, I develop a model of left-to-right parsing which maps surface strings to a semantic repreresentation, which tolerates certain systematic mismatches between word order and scope. This model allows for a parsimonious description of the distribution of scrambling that can feed scope and binding (so-called “A-scrambling”). The formal semantic proposal builds on work on left-to-right interpretation using continuations and neo-Davidsonian event semantics.

Keywords: scrambling Japanese parsing continuations scope binding reconstruction A- versus A'-movement