Word-order information in the Lexicon

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.We propose that crosslinguistic word-order variation (Abels 2016; Greenberg 1963; Cinque 2005) reflects information stored in the lexicon in the format of Lexical Items, and that the operations yielding word-order are the same that guide lexicalisation more generally in Nanosyntax (Starke 2009 and ff.). We show that this lexicalisation-based approach shares the empirical coverage of current analyses (Cinque 2023; Abels & Neeleman 2012) without making reference to (traditional) syntactic movement. This spares the system from stipulating semantically vacuous structural dependencies triggering movement, and correctly separates subtypes of movements subject to different constraints. Furthermore, the proposal favours a new perspective on how the relevant Lexical Items are acquired and activated during processing, shedding new light on the different typological frequency word-order patterns and structural priming.