Abstract
This paper explains the Greenbergian universals of modifier and adposition ordering as accidental side-effects of diachronic derivation, arguing that disparate diachronic processes can conspire to give the effect of synchronic universals. The ordering of modifiers, for example, may result from their generation by means of a binding anaphor strategy. This strategy produces similar patterning for genitive-noun and relative-noun constructions; and these, in turn, are potential diachronic sources for adjectivals. Constrained by the normative ordering of the language, this strategy will result only in preposed modifiers in verb-final languages and only in postposed modifiers in verb-initial languages. In SVO languages, it results in either preposed or postposed modifiers.
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