This study addresses the issue of unmarked word order in Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA), typologically considered an (S)OV flexible language due to its being strongly left-branching as well as due to the syntactic properties of its VP (focus, bare objects, low adverbs). However, Armenian grammars generally consider (S)VO to be the canonical order. To tackle this controversy, we have conducted a corpus study and two sentence production experiments. These studies show that the placement of DOs is mainly triggered by definiteness. While definite DOs are overwhelmingly postverbal, indefinite DOs display a strong preference for preverbal placement. This implies a “typological discrepancy”: although MEA is a strongly left-branching language, the unmarked placement of definite DOs is postverbal. We account for this “discrepancy” based on areal, historical and cognitive factors. Contact with OV languages has resulted in a consistent shift from right to left-branching in Armenian, whereas word order at the clausal level has resisted the shift, because MEA makes an optimal use of each order with respect to their cognitive advantages. The evolution of word order in MEA is an illustration of the universal cross-linguistic bias toward SVO.