Researching Word Order in the Classical Languages

Abstract

If one attempts to deal with word order problems in Latin and Greek, the difficulties that he encounters are considerable. It is hardly possible to formulate a set of rules by means of which one could give a comprehensive analysis of word order phenomena in Latin and Greek as a whole. In descriptive grammar, the word order is treated very extensively, yet the rules that are given are not as complete as one might expect. Grammatical categories of subject, object and predicate serve well as means of identifying the sentence constituents. However, an assumption can be made that the word order is to be explained by means of independent text patterns or general discourse intention of the speaker/writer.