“The standard view in Latin linguistics is that Latin essentially had a S(ubject) O(bject) (finite) V(erb) word order … However, as my use of the word ‘essentially’ suggests, many deviations from the basic SOV word order are recognized” Pinkster 1990: 69 “Despite the claim for rigid SOV word order above, the relative placement of S and O to each other is frequently determined not by their grammatical function, but by their information structure: e.g., the canonical SO word order is determined by the dominant topical status of subject and focal status of object. Yet even in cases when SOV can be recognised as the most common word order in a given early Indo-European language, the bigger blow to the basic-ness of SOV came for me in a remark of John J.