The acquisition of word order in German is one of the most intensively researched areas in second language acquisition studies. This article will begin by showing the limits of explanatory approaches discussed in the current research (developmental sequences on one hand, transfer on the other), and finally, a new psycholinguistic concept ‘the emergence of morphosyntactic conflicts’ will be introduced as an explanation for the production difficulties connected with word placement that are experienced by learners of German. Furthermore, the connection between morphosyntax and prosody will be shown as well as possibilities for their use in the teaching of subordinate clause structure, which proves to be difficult for learners of German to acquire.