Information Structure and Word Order in the Romanian Clause

We aim at providing a detailed description of all possible word orders in Romanian clauses, taking into account their pragmatic conditioning. We will examine all the major domains of the clause (the lexical domain, the inflectional domain, the periphery) and all types of clauses. Having a relatively free word order, Romanian belongs to the discourse-oriented languages, in which information structure is crucial in explaining the observed orders. We will apply to Romanian the results obtained in the last 20 years in the understanding of information structure, which have not been sufficiently used in the study of Romanian yet. We will use the facts of Romanian as a testing field for the various competing theoretical models of the relation between syntax and information structure and as a basis for refining the definitions of the information-structural notions relevant for the description of natural languages. Besides theoretical articles, we intend to elaborate studies of comparative Romance syntax, a domain in which the literature on word order and information structure is rich, but Romanian is underrepresented. For the Romanian language, the results obtained will be used in the project of a modern reference grammar, based on formal linguistics and accessible to linguists across the world: we intend to contribute consistently to the elaboration of the second volume of the Reference Grammar of Romanian, whose first volume has been issued in 2013 at Benjamins.