With respect to constituent order it should be remembered that the underlying clause structure is not linearly ordered, at least not in the sense of specifying the actual order of constituents in the surface structure of the linguistic expression. The ordering rules thus “assign” a linear position to constituents which do not yet have such a position. Therefore, these linearization rules are called “placement rules”. The formal nature of placement rules can be symbolized as follows: (36) underlying structure : {a, b, c, d} ordering template : 1 2 3 4 placement rules : a := 4 b := 2 c := 1 d := 3 output sequence : c b d a […].
- Dik (1989), a pag.62