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Annual Review of Linguistics

Volume 11, 2025

Word Order Universals and Their Relationship to Structure

  • Peter Svenonius1
  • Department of Language and Culture, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, University of Tromsø–The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 11:137-162 (Volume publication date February 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on October 16, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Word order provides important clues to underlying syntactic structure. Despite great crosslinguistic variation, some generalizations are robust enough to inform theory development. This article reviews patterns of major clause elements and their derivation and discusses a pair of generalizations relating syntactic hierarchy to surface order—namely, the Universal 20 generalization (U20) and the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC). U20 rules out basic orders in which a lower modifier precedes a higher modifier to the left of the head, as in *adjective-demonstrative-noun (*Adj-Dem-N). FOFC rules out basic orders in which a head-final projection contains a head-initial one, as in *verb-object-auxiliary (*V-O-Aux). In each case, there are two frequent orders (Aux-V-O and O-V-Aux, Dem-Adj-N and N-Adj-Dem) that reveal the underlying hierarchies transparently. The two constraints differ, however: In the order ruled out by U20, *Adj-Dem-N, the middle element is structurally the highest, while FOFC rules out an order, *V-O-Aux, in which the middle element is lowest.

Keyword(s): Antisymmetry, head-final, head-initial, linearization, Universal Grammar, word order typology
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Word Order Universals and Their Relationship to Structure
Annual Review of Linguistics 11, 137 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011724-121650
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