Harmony or Consistency?

Hawkins' book is concerned with regularities of word order and word order change in the Greenberg and Vennemann tradition. In this review it is argued that H. offers some new data and ideas, but that his work does not constitute a substantial progress. My main points of criticism are that H.'s data do not warrant the conclusions he draws if one applies statistically sound methods, and that H. considers only a restricted set of possible explanations for word order regularities.