Constituent order in Spanish: a Functional Grammar perspective

Abstract

In typological terms, it seems clear that Spanish should be classified as a language with a dominant SVO order (see for instance Siewierska 1997:551). Despite this general assumption, constituent order in Spanish also admits considerable variation in the position of its sentence constituents, for which the language has acquired a reputation of having a fairly flexible constituent order. In this paper, I refer to the linearisation patterns which occur in Spanish as alternatives to the dominant SVO order and consider them in the light of the Functional Grammar model (as in Dik 1997), particularly in the area of special sentence positions, functional patterns and pragmatic functions. The scope of this study is the declarative main clause. Although the study of Spanish constituent order has been approached by scholars working in different linguistic frameworks, there are, to the best of my knowledge, no studies on Spanish constituent order from a Functional Grammar approach in line with those for other languages (e.g. Hannay 1991, Siewierska 1998, Stanchev 1997 and Vismans 1997).