The cool thing about dependency length minimization is that you can use it as a principle to derive many of Greenberg's word order universals, in addition to se

The cool thing about dependency length minimization is that you can use it as a principle to derive many of Greenberg's word order universals, in addition to sentence-by-sentence preferences. You can also use it to derive the fact that natural language expressions are usually well-nested (though I'm somewhat dubious: it seems like there are other good possible explanations).