> Can't even put the inflected pronoun first even though it would be unambiguous: > Him Colonel Mustard killed. You can do that. It's called fronting, and it'

> Can't even put the inflected pronoun first even though it would be unambiguous: > Him Colonel Mustard killed. You can do that. It's called fronting, and it's not rare in English. It's not a case of the argument order being flexible, but what you said is just plain false. > The only variation in your English examples is with the prepositions. So? > English is a language where you just do not get that kind of flexibility. You mean the kind of flexibility I just illustrated? Or something else? You have a verb with 5 arguments. Two of them go in fixed locations. The other three don't go in fixed locations. It's not a coincidence that the arguments that are free to wander around the sentence are the ones that bear explicit markings of the nature of their relationship to the verb. > The dog the policeman bites. > Stilted and prone to get misunderstood isn't it? Not really. It's not a sentence, though; "the dog the policeman bites" is just a noun phrase referring to a dog. There's no verb. (Bites is a verb, but it's inside a relative clause.)