ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 began with detailing a psycholinguistic theory that accords rightbranching a processing advantage over left-branching. As this theory is independent of the nature of the linguistic material to be processed, it clearly has a universal ring. That is, it predicts that right-branching should occur more frequently than left-branching in the languages in the world. This prediction holds at all linguistic levels and will therefore be tested in the syntactic, morphological, and phonological domains. As so little typological work has been carried out on branching direction, the present chapter falls far short of providing definitive answers. It has to be rather eclectic and short and its conclusions can be no more than suggestive. Of course, only those structures can be considered for which some evidence is at hand. These are the major structures as defined in Chapter 2 with reference to English. Of the many criteria that were discussed in the said chapter, only a small minority can be employed here. The selection of these criteria is largely unsystematic, being determined only by the availability of relevant data.
