ABSTRACT
This paper explores flexible word-ordering of many Asian languages at the level of syntax-processing and provides an alternative linguistic view of structure-building to Western European language-centric frameworks. In the Western view, syntactic fluidity is arbitrary and is generated from a preferred structure. Despite comprising the majority of the world’s languages, those languages with flexible word ordering have been overlooked and understudied in contemporary theoretical linguistics. This paper argues that word order freedom is far from arbitrary and is instead possible because of the multivalency of structure-building sources in Asian languages, that include morphological particles and prosodic cues that give rise to the process of creating meaningful communication. Particles hold significant morpho-syntactic information that allows word order flexibility to occur in natural language. Feature-driven derivational grammar-formalisms are limited in their capability to explain incrementality found in verb-final languages, and adopting a grammar formalism such as Dynamic Syntax (DS) or Pragmatic Syntax will be essential to capture the dynamics of structural growth without stipulation.
