  Little is known about why SOV order is initially preferred and then discarded
or recovered. Here we present a framework for understanding these and many
related word order phenomena: the diversity of dominant orders, the existence
of free words orders, the need of alternative word orders and word order
reversions and cycles in evolution. Under that framework, word order is
regarded as a multiconstraint satisfaction problem in which at least two
constraints are in conflict: online memory minimization and maximum
predictability.
