Word-order information in the Lexicon

We propose that crosslinguistic word-order variation (Greenberg 1963; Cinque 2005; Abels 2016) 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). We show that this lexicalisation-based approach shares the empirical coverage of current analyses (Cinque 2005; Abels & Neeleman 2012; Cinque 2023) 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. The proposal also favours a novel perspective on how the relevant Lexical Items are acquired and activated during processing, shedding new light on the different typological frequency of word-order patterns and structural priming.