Languages of the world vary concerning the order of subject, object and verb. The most frequent dominant orders are SOV and SVO, and researchers have tailored models to this fact. However, there are still languages whose dominant order does not conform to these expectations or even lack a dominant order. Here we show that across linguistic families and macroareas, word order variation within languages is shaped by the principle of swap distance minimization even when the dominant order is not SOV/SVO and even when a dominant order is lacking.

翻译：世界语言在主语、宾语和动词的词序上存在差异。最常见的优势词序是SOV和SVO，研究者已针对这一现象构建了模型。然而，仍有一些语言的优势词序不符合这些预期，甚至缺乏明确的优势词序。本文表明，跨语系和宏观区域而言，即便优势词序并非SOV/SVO，甚至缺乏优势词序时，语言内部的词序变异仍受交换距离最小化原则的支配。