ABSTRACT
There can be no doubt that questions of order have top priority. In processing messages, we have to submit to the White Queen’s remark: ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’ (Carroll 1968: 254). As Alice says, ‘We can’t remember things before they happen’. We can only interpret sentences against the background of what we know, or, more precisely, what we can think of at the time of processing a message. Some of the things we can think of at this very moment will be the things we were told before in the immediately preceding message, including all the thoughts that the previous sentence(s) had activated in our brains. Elements which have already been activated are, certainly, easier to identify than elements we have not yet thought of. Thus, it seems only natural to place the familiar before the new. But even if we ignore all those particular situations where we might want to deviate from this natural order of presentation, the natural, easy-to-process order of elements is a highly complex affair, subject to linguistic and extralinguistic constraints. It is clear that grammar plays a decisive role here and as languages differ in their grammars, we can expect grammatically based differences in the order of elements. But as we shall see soon, grammar has its repercussions at the level of style related to contextual appropriateness and conditions of optimal processing.
