Word length predicts word order: "Min-max"-ing drives language evolution

ArXi:2505.13913v3 Announce Type: replace A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable in most languages, this has been a productive field of study for decades (see Greenberg 1963; Dryer 2007; Hawkins 2014