A Comparison of the Slovene and the Italian Word Orders in Sentences with Three or Two Elements

Abstract

This paper intends to highlight the interaction of factors that affect the word order in Slovene and Italian. The basic word order is the same in both languages; subject-verb-object (SVO). However, Slovene and Italian differ in one being an analytical and the other a synthetic language, and being Romance and Slavic, respectively. The word order in the language pair differs in the degree of freedom one has to form different sentence variations. I will try to verify the hypothesis that pragmatic and semantic factors have a greater impact on the Slovenian word order than the grammatical ones, while grammatical factors have more influence on the word order in Italian. The analysis examines the word order in sentences with three elements, S, V and O as well as the word order in sentences with two elements, i.e. S and V or O and V. The VS/SV or VO/OV patterns are, again, the result of an in- terplay between pragmatic and semantic factors.