ABSTRACT
Older grammars tended to explain Spanish word order in terms of ‘style’, but linguistic analysis has shown that Spanish word order depends on factors like the difference between ‘new’ and ‘given’ information and focused or non-focused information. Spanish word order is as complex a question as intonation and word stress is in English. The latter relies heavily on stress and intonation: consider the differences in meaning between ‘I’m going to school’ (neutral sentence), ‘I’m going to school’ (not you), ‘I’m going to school’ (you said I wasn’t), ‘I’m going to school’ (not coming back from it), ‘I’m going to school’ (not somewhere else). Spanish makes far less use of this type of word emphasis or loudness, although it can play a part in Spanish-see 37.5. Instead it uses different sentence patterns to achieve the same effect: voy al colegio, yo voy al colegio, pero sí voy al colegio, al colegio es adonde voy, etc.
