Gouskova, Maria. 2001. Split scrambling: Barriers as violable constraints. (short version) In K. Megerdoomian and L. A. Bar-el, eds. Proceedings of the 20th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 220-223.
Barriers are violable, universal constraints in an Optimality Theoretic grammar (Prince and Smolensky 1993). Barrier constraints form a fixed hierarchy, such that movement out of a DP or a PP is crosslinguistically more marked than movement out of a VP. The analysis predicts that no language allows movement out of DP or PP but bans the same type of movement out of VP. If a constraint that requires movement dominates DP BARRIER, it also dominates PP and VP BARRIER. Russian allows movement to cross all three barriers, while English tolerates crossing VPs and PPs but not DPs, and Malagasy bans movement even out of VPs.