Is Linear Order Derived?

The paper casts a critical eye on those dependency grammars (DGs) that view linear order as derived from hierarchical order. It argues that MTT is such a DG insofar as language synthesis begins with a semantic representation, progresses through syntactic representations that lack linear order, and then proceeds to the morphological and phonological representations that include linear order. The difficulty that the intermediate syntactic representations generate is they necessitate that certain phenomena of syntax be subjected to analyses that ignore linear order. This necessity is problematic in various areas, such as idiosyncratic meaning and coordination. Monostratal DGs are not faced with these difficulties, since they do not posit intermediate syntactic strata that lack linear order.