Table 1.

Greenberg word-order correlations, exemplified by Arabic (left) and Japanese (right) examples

	Arabic (English, …)		Japanese (Turkish, …)
Correlation no.	Correlates with verb	Correlates with object	Correlates with object	Correlates with verb
	kataba	risāla	tegami-o	kaita
	wrote	letter	letter	wrote
①	li	ṣadīq	tomodachi	ni
	to	a friend	friend	to
②	kāna	ṣadīq	tomodachi	datta
	was	a friend	friend	was
③	sawfa	yaktub	kak-	-udesho
	will	write	write	will
④	ṣadīq	John	John no	tomodachi
	friend	of John	John of	friend
⑤	kutub	taqra’uhā	anata-ga yonda	hon
	books	that you read	that you read	book
⑥	’an	tuṣil	toochaku suru	koto
	that	she arrives	arrives	that
⑦	dhahabt	’ilā lmadrasa	gakkoo ni	itta
	went	to school	school to	went
⑧	’urīd	’an ’ughādir	ik-	-itai
	wants	to leave	to go	want

Across the world, the orders of different constituents are strikingly correlated with that of verb and object. Selection is based on a more recent typological study by Dryer (13), restricted to those correlations that are annotated in available corpus data. See SI Appendix, section S1 for more on Greenberg correlations.