  Here we respond to some comments by Alday concerning headedness in linguistic
theory and the validity of the assumptions of a mathematical model for word
order. For brevity, we focus only on two assumptions: the unit of measurement
of dependency length and the monotonicity of the cost of a dependency as a
function of its length. We also revise the implicit psychological bias in
Alday's comments. Notwithstanding, Alday is indicating the path for linguistic
research with his unusual concerns about parsimony from multiple dimensions.
