Rethinking cartography

The cartographic program has investigated interesting crosslinguistic linear orderings among various sentence constituents. Its signature technical move is to postulate hierarchies of functional projections related by functional selection. I note three problems that functional hierarchies encounter in capturing linear order: ‘explanation’, ‘plenitude’, and ‘rigidity’. I compare linearity in cartography with linearity in the integers, which involves a single relation (<) ordering the domain. I consider work by Scontras et al. (2017) arguing for a single ‘inequality relation’ un-derlying the ordering of attributive adjectives in nominals and show how this result can be incor-porated into a feature-driven theory of syntactic projection. This captures crosslinguistic linear orderings without appeal to functional selection or functional hierarchies.*.