ABSTRACT
Word order in Lithuanian is relatively free and that means that the syntactical function of the word does not depend on its position in the sentence. The function of the word is shown by the grammatical form of the word; therefore, its position in the sentence can change: in a sentence, the subject can be placed both before the predicate and after the predicate, and in the beginning, there can be the object and so on. Word order can depend on the necessity to emphasize some part of the sentence and to highlight some functional sentence perspective. Therefore, both the grammatical structure of the sentence and the functional sentence perspective, i.e. the presentation of theme (topic), what is known, and rheme (focus), what is new, determine the word order in the sentence.
