The Verb-Initial Word Order in the Early Poetry of Vedic and Ancient Greek

The verb-initial position is attested at least as a marginal word order in all early IE languages, and is therefore probably inherited. Still, the contexts that are more typically related to this order are so numerous and various that scholars disagree on its original function. This paper, based on data from Vedic and Homeric Greek, attempts an analysis of the verb-initial order in the light of recent studies of information structure, and particularly of the pragmatic principle of theticity. Verb-initial clauses are here interpreted as thetic clauses, whereby the subject is the focus rather than the topic of the clause.