This paper, a review of the literature on word order typology, examines in detail a body of work (Comrie 1989; Comrie, Dryer, Gil, Haspelmath 2005; Dryer 1988, 1991, 1992, 2007; Greenberg 1966; Hawkins 1983; Lehmann 1973; Vennemann 1974) that made a major contribution to linguistics by introducing the subfield of typology and the study of word order across the world’s languages from a typological perspective. Greenberg’s (1966) seminal paper advanced an understanding of cross-linguistic tendencies that had been unknown at the time and which are still being investigated today, especially his three-way typology based on the relative position of V with respect to S and O. Lehmann (1973) and Vennemann (1974) pushed the VO/OV distinction which led to a reanalysis and diminishing of the role of S as an organizing parameter. Two theories, Vennemann’s Head-Dependent Theory and Hawkins’ Cross-Category Harmony, account for many attested correlation pairs, but neither is as strong as Dryer’s Branching Direction Theory in terms of explanatory adequacy, elegance, and adherence to observed cross-linguistic tendencies. As far as theoretical approaches, we note that generative grammar with its focus on single-language study cannot provide an account of the variations in the world’s languages, while the typological approach comes closer to describing universals of language based on empirical data. Finally, I present the idea that investigations of word order from a typological perspective can be successfully undertaken using a functionalist approach within the framework of Optimality Theory. / text

The present contribution examines object complement clauses from the perspective of constituent-order typology. In particular, it provides the first principled empirical investigation of the position of object clauses relative to the matrix verb. Based on a stratified sample of 100 languages, we establish that there is an overall cross-linguistic preference for postverbal complements, due largely to the heterogeneous ordering patterns in OV-languages. Importantly, however, we also show that the position of complement clauses correlates with aspects of their structural organization: Preverbal complement clauses are significantly more likely to be coded by morphosyntactically “downgraded” structures than postverbal complements. Given that previous research has found a parallel correlation between structural downgrading and the semantics of the complement-taking predicate (Givón 1980. The binding hierarchy and the typology of complements. Studies in Language 4. 333–377, Cristofaro 2003. Subordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press), one needs to analyze how positional, structural and semantic factors interact with one another. Our data suggest that the correlation between clause order and morphosyntactic structure holds independently of semantic considerations: All predicate classes distinguished in the present study increase their likelihood of taking downgraded complements if they are preceded by the complement clause. We thus propose that, in addition to the well-known “binding hierarchy”, a second correlation needs to be recognized in the typology of complementation: the co-variation of linear order and morphosyntactic structure.

Typologisk klassificering av kardinaltals ordföljdstendenser har generellt utgått från en binär uppdelning i pre- och postnominella språk, men viss inomspråklig variation i ordföljdsmönster mellan olika kardinaltal har hittats bland världens språk. Tillgång till parallelltexter på många olika språk möjliggör storskalig kvantitativ typologisk analys av syntaktiska fenomen som detta, givet en lämplig strategi för språkoberoende parsning av icke-annoterat material. I denna studie undersöks aspekter av kardinaltalsberoende ordföljdsvariation i 1336 språk genom ordlänkning och annoteringsöverföring i en massivt parallell korpus av Bibelöversättningar. Källtexter märks upp med syntaktisk och lexikal annotering som förs över till icke-annoterad ordlänkad data på andra språk, och ordföljdstendenser för varje kardinaltal och språk mäts statistiskt. Utvärdering av metodens klassificering av generell kardinaltalsordföljd gav 87 % överensstämmelse med data från den manuellt sammanställda WALS-databasen, i linje med tidigare evalueringar av liknande metoder. Variation i ordföljdsmönster mellan individuella kardinaltal uppvisades i en väsentlig andel av undersökta språk, vilket motiverar värdet av en mer detaljerad klassificering av kardinaltals ordföljdstypologi. Undersökning av seriell ordföljdsvariation, där ett seriellt gränsvärde finns mellan olika dominerande ordföljdstyper i ett språks kardinaltalssystem, visade att den överlägset vanligaste strukturen för seriell variation i den undersökta datan var prenominella uttryck för 1 i språk där den dominerande kardinaltalsordföljden klassats som postnominell. / Typological word order classification for cardinal numerals has generally used a binary pre- or postnominal model, but in some languages word order behaviour has been shown to vary between individual cardinal numerals. This phenomenon can be quantitatively studied on a larger typological scale using massively parallel texts, given a cross-language method for parsing non-annotated texts. In this study, cardinal numeral-dependent word order variation is extracted from Bible translations in 1336 languages through word alignment and annotation transfer from syntactically and lexically annotated source texts to all translations in the corpus. Classification of dominant numeral word order using the transferred annotations agreed with manually gathered classifications from the WALS database for 87 % of common languages, which is in line with previous similar studies. Possible numeral-dependent word order variation was identified in a significant number of languages in the sample, supporting the case for use of a more nuanced word order classification structure. Analysis of serial word order variation, where a cardinal numeral of a certain value separates continuous numeral sequences with different dominant word orders, showed the most common structure for this type of variation to be the 1-numeral preceding the noun while all other numerals follow the noun they modify.