Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Until quite recently, the study of basic word order and correlates of ‘basic’ word order was limited to typological studies of language. The issue was either ignored by generative grammar or assumed to have no theoretical basis. Recent work in the minimalist approaches to principles and parameter syntax, however, has opened up the study of word orders, their derivations, and the correlates of those orders. Influential papers by Pollock (1989) and Chomsky (1991) provided a framework in which to develop a constrained view of phrase structure and predicate-argument placement. Kayne’s (1994) antisymmetric approach to phrase structure further constrains the possible word orders of language. In his view, the only underlying word order is subject-verb-object; all other word orders are derived from this order by one means or another. In this volume, we consider one subset of word orders—those that are verb initial; whether these orders are derived or not; whether there is a uniform derivation of the word orders; and whether there are any putative universal correlates of these orders.