Interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors on basic word order in the languages of Europe

In this work word order types found in the languages of Europe are considered under different perspectives: the interplay of position, syntactic function, and pragmatic function with respect to sentences with two arguments and one argument; the effect of the particular case of verb and all-sentence focus; the influence of semantic features (animacy, definiteness, and referentiality of nominal arguments) and of the given-new dichotomy as a textual feature. The survey of word order patter of European languages according to these perspectives allows the establishment of a set of principles which set a network of conditions regulating the organization of word order patterns. The principles constrain the organization of the "sentence space", defined in terms of the relationship between constituents, constituent position, and the domain that contains them, barring, for examples the possibility for a constituent to occur in certain positions, even in marked constructions, as in the case of the space to the right of V in SOV languages. Particular attention is devoted to the interaction between constituency and the assignment of the focus function to O, that is, the constituent with the greater depth of embedding, discussed in detail with respect to the preverbal position of SOV languages, which could also result from the effect of semantic (e.g., animacy) or morphological (agglutination) features. This work is a typological contribution to the comparison of different word order patterns found in European (and non-European) languages.