Pragmatic factors that determine main clause constituent order variation in Greek: a diachronic perspective

This article sets out to empirically assess the theoretical claim that there is a move towards syntacticization in Modern Greek. This is conducted within Lambrecht’s (1994) theoretical framework of different information-structure types, which had to be specially adapted for Greek. In Classical Greek, it is not possible to identify a single word order pattern as the unmarked one. Furthermore, there is no direct mapping between syntactic constructions and pragmatic contexts. By contrast, in Modern Greek, SV(O) has been ‘promoted’ to the status of the unmarked word order type. There is also a more direct correlation between syntactic configurations and pragmatic functions.