Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility

For some time the assumption has been widely held that for a majority of the world's languages, one can identify a “basic” order of subject and object relative to the verb, and that when combined with other facts of the language, the “basic” order constitutes a useful way of typologizing languages. New debate has arisen over varying definitions of “basic”, with investigators encountering languages where branding a particular order of grammatical relations as basic yielded no particular insightfu