On morphological case and word-order freedom∗

A commonly made cross-linguistic generalization is that languages with extensive case-marking tend also to have greater freedom of word order than languages without. Explicit statements to this effect can be found in Sapir (1921, pp. 66, 177ff.), Jakobson (1936, p. 28) and more recently in Blake (2001, p. 15), but the idea goes back to the beginning of comparative studies of language. Thus on the one hand, languages like Sanskrit, Finnish and Latin, which have extensive case distinctions, allow the order of nominal arguments in a sentence to be permuted without changing the basic meaning of the sentence (see 1). On the other hand, swapping the order of arguments in languages like English and French, whose case-marking is limited to relics in the pronominal system, is not possible without swapping their grammatical roles (see 2).