User:Aila Lila/sandbox

An ultimate goal of theoretical linguistics is to provide causal explanations for syntactic phenomenona. These include why English and many other languages have a different word order in declarative and interrogative clauses, starting with the question word; or why some languages place the object before the verb (e.g. Japanese), and others after the verb. There are also several languages which have a different canonical word order in main clauses and sub-clauses, e.g. German and Dutch; and in many Germanic languages starting a sentence with an adverbial changes the verb order to verb before subject. Other issues include information packaging, a topic which is studied in pragmatics. Two main issues include topicality and novelty of information. For example, in many European languages new information is focalized at the end of the sentence while many American languages place new and thus focal information in the beginning of the sentence.