Why does head-final order correlate harmonically with SOV word order, rather than SVO or VSO, in cross-linguistic typology?

💡 Explanation

Head-final order creates a harmonic relationship with SOV because it consistently places heads (verbs) at the end of their phrases, aligning dependency directionality. This facilitates efficient processing, therefore SOV correlates with head-final orders rather than creating mixed dependency directionality which increases processing load.

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