<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">Dear Fritz (if I may)<div><br></div><div>Within the Minimalist Program, many people assume Kayne’s (1994) idea of the antisymmetry in syntax, which argues that ‘basic word order’ is Specifier-Head-Complement. This idea may imply that SVO is the basic word order. Other word orders are derived by movement of constituents. </div><div><br></div><div>Another idea is that there is no order in syntax while head-complement order is determined at the syntax-PF interface. Some people call the mechanism ‘flip’. Of course we need to explain why some ‘basic’ orders are more frequent than others. Personally, I think that phonology of each language determines word orders in the language. Please have a look at our paper in the following book, which includes papers on word orders from the formalist point of view:</div><div><br></div><div>Tokizaki, Hisao and Yasutomo Kuwana (2013) A stress-based theory of disharmonic word orders,</div><div><i>Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order</i> ed. by Theresa Biberauer and Michelle Sheehan, OUP.</div><div><br></div><div>Best wishes,</div><div>Hisao</div><div><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><div>Hisao Tokizaki</div><div><a href="mailto:toki@sapporo-u.ac.jp">toki@sapporo-u.ac.jp</a></div><div><a href="http://toki.nagomix.net/">http://toki.nagomix.net/</a></div></span></div></body></html>