Tree Traversal and Word Order

This article looks at how the two-dimensional organization of a syntactic tree is translated into a one-dimensional string. It proposes a method of linearization that extracts the terminal string by visiting the nodes of a tree systematically in a predetermined order, either preorder, inorder, or postorder traversal. Crucially, it also argues that given a particular formulation of the extraction process, the traversal method chosen by individual languages produces the well-known crosslinguistic variations in word order typology (SVO, SOV, VSO, etc.) without having to resort to remnant movement.