English and Chinese express the attribution directly by means of order. In Latin [...] 'illa' and 'alba' may occupy almost any position in the sentence.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.96

One of the most insidious peculiarities of a linguistic drift is that where it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it innocuous by washing the old significance out of it. [...] This brings us to the second of the major drifts, the tendency to fixed position in the sentence, determined by the syntactic relation of the word.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.166

[...] as the inflected forms of English became scantier, as the syntactic relations were more and more inadequately expressed by the forms of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradually took over functions originally foreign to it.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.166