The word orders of English and Dutch. Collective vs. individual checking Jan Koster University of Groningen 1. Introduction 1.1 The problem In this article, I will show that the vast collection of word order differences between English and Dutch, including the most characteristic and central ones such as the VO/OV distinction, follows from only one small difference in how phrases for feature checking are defined. Prac- tically all differences, in other words, turn out to follow from a simple difference between the two languages with respect to Pied Piping. Almost since its inception, modern generative grammar, in this respect at least inspired by structuralist ideas of Greenberg (1966) and others, has assumed that the languages of the world can be divided in those with VSO, SVO or SOV as their deep structure order. Occa- sionally, some other basic orders of Subject, Verb and Object were proposed (like VOS for Malagasy), but gradually a near-consensus developed that Verb and Object (V and O) are adjacent in underlying structure, that Subjects precede Objects and that the basic word orders are therefore SVO and SOV. Among the Germanic languages, English and the Scandinavian languages are considered to represent the SVO type, while Dutch and German are usually analyzed as SOV (Thiersch (1978), Koster (1975)). Another aspect of the received view was that the distinction between, say, English and Dutch results from a parameter, the so-called OV/VO parameter (see for instance Neeleman (1994)). This view has never been satisfactory, because, corresponding with the OV/VO distinc- tion, there is a substantial number of other facts not at all covered by the simple parameter. For instance, unlike the VO languages, the Germanic OV languages Dutch and German show a great deal of scrambling, which appears to be typical of OV languages in general vis-a-vis VO languages (cf. Corver and Van Riemsdijk (1993)). Up until recently, this correlation be- tween OV and relatively free word order was completely unexplained. But also the OV/VO parameter itself is hardly more than a stipulation telling us what we already know, namely that there are word order differences between English and German. A real theory would explain the correlations in question and even clarify why there is an OV/VO distinction in the first place. As it stands, not even the simplest differences in word order between closely-related lan- guages like English and Dutch are accounted for. In Dutch, for instance, it is entirely natural to have adverbials between verb and object (la), while such is completely impossible in Eng- lish (lb):