1. Introduction
South east Asia is a geographical area which is extremely rich from a linguistic point of view, being a
Balkan-like region where a wide range of language families meet and interact with each other. The
particular focus of interest of the present paper is the internal structure of DPs and the specific
problem of how to account for the considerable amount of cross-linguistic variation which appears to
occur in the ordering of constituents in DPs. Some of the patterns found are schematised below in (1-