Word order and information structure in New Testament Greek This dissertation examines word order variation in the Koine Greek of the New Testament Greek in a variety of domains : declarative clauses , questions and relative clauses . In particular , I examine the way in which word order corresponds to information structure . It is argued that although New Testament Greek shows a variety of possible permutations of the sentence elements subject ( S ) , verb ( V ) and object ( O ) , in declarative clauses , questions and relative clauses , the word order is not free . Rather , it is partly governed by phrase structure and partly by information structural considerations such as Topic and Focus . This is manifested in all of the domains investigated . I argue that the basic word order is best described as VSO with an SVO alternative basic word order . Marked clauses , such as SOV , OVS , OSV and also some SVO clauses involve topicalization or focus movement of the arguments . This thesis is of interest to syntacticians who are interested in word order and the syntax - pragmatics interface as well as to historical linguistics and classics scholars .
