Word order

Mirjam Fried
Table of contents

The one-dimensional, linear nature of linguistic expression represents a fundamental property of human language and yet, it is evidently at odds not only with the fact that any particular linearization likely expresses a piece of conceptually complex reality, but also that it does so by using a hierarchically organized, multi-dimensional grammatical system. Moreover, languages display strikingly different linearization patterns, while at the same time showing equally striking regularities. Issues of word order and word order variation thus can, and have been, studied from various perspectives, with various research goals in mind, and on the basis of various types of empirical evidence.

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