The Principle of Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) predicts that the overall or average distance between syntactic heads and their dependents tends to be minimized. Here we ask two questions: (i) are shorter dependencies preferred in syntactic alternations with flexible orderings across languages? (ii) how does the extent of DLM in ordering preferences vary among languages with different syntactic characteristics? Leveraging large-scale multilingual corpora, we use double PP ordering typology as the test bed (*Zoey **presented** [ **on** something linguistics ] [ **to** her professors and colleagues ]* vs. *Zoey **presented** [ **to** her professors and colleagues ] [ **on** something linguistics ]*) and show a crosslinguistic tendency for DLM. Though the extent of DLM is much weaker in general in preverbal domains compared to that in postverbal domains. **Any comments, questions and criticism are more than welcome! Come chat with me on Google hangout (yiliu@ucdavis.edu) if you'd like.**