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. 2020 Jan 21;117(5):2347–2353. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1910923117

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

One word-order correlation. Languages can order the object after (Arabic) or before (Japanese) the verb and have prepositions (Arabic) or postpositions (Japanese). For each combination, we indicate how many languages satisfy it, as documented in the World Atlas of Language Structures (12). Combinations on the diagonal are vastly more common than off-diagonal ones.