Word order in late Old Czech (1500-1620): status of a synthetic predicate in the main sentence

The word order of Slavie languages is an important point of interest of both Czech and foreign linguists. The Czech word order has been described e.g. by L. Uhlířová, by the so called Prague School of Functional Sentence Perspective (P. Sgall, E. Hajičová, E. Buráňová), by J. Firbas and A. Svoboda. Recently, new works referring to the theme are published abroad. (Franks - King 2000, Zybatow et al. 2001 ). The word order- or, more exactly, the ordering of the verb, the subject and the object in a sentence constitutes a basis for the word order typology of languages. The typology distinguishes SVO-languages (subject - verb - object), SOV -languages and others (Encyklopedický slovník češtiny, 2002: 503). According to the typology, present Czech is an SVO-language: the verb usually follows the subject and the object is placed after the verb (cf. the term systemic ordering in the Czech linguistic tradition, Sgall - Hajičová- Buráňová, 1980: 77). As the handbooks of the history of the Czech language show, there was a phase in the development of Czech during which a predicate verb was often placed at the end of a sentence. 1 This characteristics is mentioned in the linguistic literature usually in connection with the Czech in the period of humanism (cf. Havránek, 1979). (This period begins in the 14th_15th century..