Why does verb-object-subject (VOS) order remain relatively rare cross-linguistically despite its logical possibility?

💡 Explanation

VOS order violates the principle of head-dependent harmonic alignment, where heads (verbs) typically precede their dependents (objects/subjects); this increases processing difficulty because the expected dependency structure is disrupted. Therefore, VOS is disfavored, rather than being preferred due to statistical dependencies or parameter settings which do not fully explain distributional skew.

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