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Matthew S. Dryer is a linguist whose research combines linguistic typology, syntax and language documentation. His work has developed cross-language comparisons of word order and related structural properties, and he coedited the World Atlas of Language Structures.^[ref]

His atlas chapter on the order of subject, object and verb makes the comparison operational. It specifies the constructions considered and defines the participant labels for that purpose, rather than assuming that every grammatical framework uses the labels identically.^[ref]

This illustrates a central measurement problem in comparative research. Counting languages under a label is reproducible only if another researcher can determine which documented constructions satisfy it. Missing data, a different construction type or a changed coding rule can alter a count without representing a historical change in the language itself. Linking each observation to its definition and evidence lets a lexical database or grammatical dataset support testable comparisons.