Looking out for number one: Greek word order

In Ancient Greek, restrictions on surface word order are typically of a pragmatic nature: different word order patterns express the different status of discourse referents. While in many languages, information structure is grammaticalized in the sense that pragmatic roles are associated with specific phrase structural positions, e.g. the specifier of IP or CP, I will argue that in Ancient Greek, the two pragmatic roles focus and topic compete for the first position in the sentence. As a result, we find sentences where the focus precedes the topic as well as sentences where the topic precedes the focus.1 (1) diabrôtika corrosive-nom.pl men part ga