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Modern German is a language with relatively ›free‹ word order, i. e.: the serialization of constituents is dependent not only on syntactic requirements, but determined also by information structural or cognitive factors. As the same is true for Proto-Indoeuropean, it is tempting to assume that German perpetuates the PIE word order freedom. A corpus study of the relative order of accusative and dative object, using several Early New High German texts from the time between 1350 and 1550, stemming from 4 different dialect areas, shows that this assumption is wrong: German underwent a period of strictly syntactically governed constituent order (dative object before accusative object) which began before the Old High German period and lasted into the 16th century. Information structural or cognitive factors do not play a role for serializastion in this period. The relative position of the objects must be separated from the question of ›scrambling‹ in the sense that material is moved to the left of the subject, as we find examples of constituent order dative object before subject early on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]