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’ underlying the ordering of attributive adjectives in nominals and show how this result can be incorporated into a feature-driven theory of syntactic projection. This captures crosslinguistic linear orderings without appeal to functional selection or functional hierarchies.
