In this article, I summarize some of the main findings of my PhD thesis in Scandinavian linguistics: Syntactic structures in time (in Swedish: Syntaktiska strukturer i tiden). The dissertation deals with the loss of object-verb order (OV), and similar word-order patterns in the history of Swedish where a complement precedes a syntactic head in the verb phrase (e.g., a PP preceding a main verb). The development of the word-order variation and change is divided into three different stages: (i) The golden age of OV word order, taking place before the 14th century, where almost all types of complements frequently precede their head; (ii) the age of changeable variation, where objects and the like continue to occur before verbs to a certain extent for several centuries, with minor changes in frequency within and between different word-order categories; and (iii) the age of disappearance: during the first half of the 18th century, OV and similar patterns cease to be an option encoded in the grammar of Swedish. I finally emphasize that this variation and change, in Swedish and in other Germanic languages as well, can be explained by appealing to the theory of human parsing formulated by Hawkins (1994).