Word Order

Abstract

The way constituents are ordered in a linguistic expression is determined by general principles and language-specific rules. This article is mostly concerned with general ordering principles and the three main linguistic categories that are relevant for constituent order research: formal, functional, and semantic categories. The general principles appear to be motivated by cognitive considerations, which are deemed to facilitate language processing and which can all be regarded as manifestations of iconicity: nonarbitrary relations between the form and the content of a linguistic expression. Three major iconic ordering principles are the principles of Domain Integrity, Scope, and Head Proximity.