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In:Historical Linguistics 2023: Selected papers from the 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics,Heidelberg, 4-8 September 2023
Edited by Jadranka Gvozdanović
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 371] 2026
► pp. 180–241

Syntactic change

The word-order cycle

 | Stanford University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Long-term changes, and their independent recurrence in different languages and families, are an unsolved problem for historical linguistics. They are hard to reconcile with the standard view that morphological and syntactic changes are due to error-driven reanalysis by language learners. I defend instead a bias-driven model based on Optimality Theory, which posits that the course of acquisition is shaped by learners’ construction of successively more accurate fully ranked constraint systems.
Suppose the probability of a language is measured by the proportion of fully ranked constraint systems that generate it, its r-volume (Riggle 2010), and that learners continuously revise their evolving grammars to accommodate new data they encounter. The likelihood of a language being projected by a learner will then be proportional to its r-volume. The learning process is thus intrinsically biased in favor of the most probable language that is consistent with the learner’s experience. The hypothesis is that this is the mechanism behind drift. Here we investigate word-order change from this perspective.
Languages with consistently head-initial phrase structure tend to have a richly branching spine of functional projections, whereas languages with head-final phrase structure tend to have relatively flat syntax. Over time, languages can change from either of these types to the other. I present a simple OT constraint system that derives the core categorical universals of clausal word order, including the preference for Subject-Object order over Object-Subject order, and an improved version of the Final-Over-Final-Constraint, and then show that this constraint system also predicts the observed correlation between basic word-order type and the repertoire of syntactic functional heads. Coupled with the assumption of bias-driven language acquisition, this yields an explanation of word order drift. The well-established processes by which function words are morphologized and lost, and then replaced again with new syntactic heads by grammaticalization, can be seen to drive a syntactic word order cycle.
Article outline
  • 1.Drift, convergence, and unidirectionality
    • 1.1The problem of drift
    • 1.2Indo-European
    • 1.3The OV > VO drift
    • 1.4Is drift a mirage?
    • 1.5Is drift the result of chance?
    • 1.6Is drift supervescence?
    • 1.7Is drift simplification?
    • 1.8Is word order change triggered by morphology?
  • 2.Reanalysis and drift
    • 2.1Acquisition and change
    • 2.2Error-driven reanalysis
    • 2.3Empirical objections to error-driven reanalysis
  • 3.Bias-driven change
    • 3.1Acquisition and change
    • 3.2Building the OT analysis: Word-order constraints
  • 4.OT linearization vs. FOFC
    • 4.1Quantitative predictions
    • 4.2Word-order typology
    • 4.3Lexical vs. functional heads
    • 4.4Sublexical heads are not visible to syntax
    • 4.5[[F XP]FP Y] is benign disharmony
  • 5.Word-order change
    • 5.1Diachronic predictions
    • 5.2Germanic
    • 5.3Latin
    • 5.4Greek
    • 5.5VO > OV
    • 5.6Bantu and Niger-Congo
  • 6.Hill-climbing
  • 7.Conclusion: The word order cycle
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (225)
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