Abstract

Translations from English into German show that about every second sentence does not begin like the original although discourse conditions are similar and analogous beginnings are seldom excluded for linguistic reasons. In many cases, the differences concern word order (as weil as perspective and structural explicitness), in particular the preposing/topicalizing of arguments or adjuncts. To explain the findings, the strategy of discourse linking by the order given before new (for simple, binary information structures) is complemented by a strategy of balanced information distribution (for complex information structures with more than two values). Successful implementation of either strategy will be shown tobe subject to different conditions in a "freely" variable language with a right peripheral verb phrase as opposed to a language with a left peripheral verb phrase and "rigid" word order.