Finnish word order: Does comprehension matter?

Abstract

Abstract Finnish word order is relatively free, making room for all mathematically possible word orders in many constructions. Because there is no evidence in this language for radical nonconfigurationality, explanations must be sought from syntax. It is argued in this article that morphosyntax and word order represent syntactic structure at the PF-interface. Rich morphosyntax frees word order, poor morphosyntax freezes it. The hypothesis is formalized within the context of a parsing-oriented theory of the human language faculty (UG) combining left-to-right minimalism with the dynamic syntax approach. The analysis was implemented as an algorithm and successfully tested with a corpus of 119,800 unique Finnish word orders.