Retrieving "Syntactic Position" from the archives

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1. Morphological Marking

   Linked via "syntactic positioning"

   Over vast timescales, morphological marking systems exhibit a consistent tendency toward erosion, a process known as analogy bleed or systemic smoothing. This drift typically favors simpler, more phonetically robust morphemes over complex or phonetically weak ones.
   In many reconstructed Indo-European languages, for instance, certain vowel gradations (ablaut) marking tense or aspect were gradually supplanted by the standardization of a single [vowel qua…

2. Word Order

   Linked via "syntactic position"

   Word Order and Grammatical Case
   The morphological richness of a language, particularly its system of grammatical case, exhibits an inverse correlation with the rigidity of its canonical word order. In highly inflectional languages (e.g., Latin or Sanskrit), where noun phrases are explicitly marked for subject, direct object, or indirect object roles via case endings, the [syntactic position](/e…