In this chapter I discuss different criteria and strategies related to the order of words, morphemes and syntactic constituents. There are very many theories, especially in psycholinguistics, which argue for some word orders being more costly than others. I argue that different ways of minimizing processing costs can be interpreted as maximization of accessibility, according to the general principles introduced in Chapter 1. First, I discuss which factors can, according to different researchers, make word order more or less costly, based on the existing evidence. Next, I provide well-known examples of efficiency and discuss competing explanations. The strategies include minimization of dependency distances and syntactic domains, putting Subject first, using a specific order of noun phrase elements and morphemes, Greenbergian word order correlations and avoidance of crossing dependencies, which can be explained by the preference for continuous constituents.

Infinitival constructions have been central in Germanic for several reasons and they have been at the core of theory-building syntactic research. This paper presents an overview of two research areas— exceptional case marking (ECM) and restructuring. While in-depth discussions of these rich topics are not possible, we aim to highlight some of the major discoveries and remaining puzzles. The first part of the chapter discusses the distinction between control and ECM and provides an overview of the distribution of ECM in six Germanic languages (English, Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, and German). The second part of the paper summarizes phenomena falling under the rubric of restructuring. Although the literature on restructuring has focused predominantly on German and Dutch, phenomena showing sensitivity to restructuring have also been observed in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Finally, in the last part we combine the observations regarding ECM and restructuring and suggest a possible connection.