Gramática y pragmática en el orden de palabras

Résumé

Word order in Spanish is relatively free, and it is usual to consider it as a pragmatic or discourse phenomenon. However, even if a pragmatic side is present in its use, word order patterns are determined by the grammar, and it is grammar that sets the conditions to establish information structure, with topic/comment and focus/background partitions. The task of linguistic analysis must be to unveil what exactly the contribution of the grammatical system to information structure is in each of the word order patterns admitted in a language. The role of pragmatic inference is the usual one: to elaborate on the instructions encoded by grammar in combining them with contextual assumptions.