| Résumé: | Two positions have been traditionally defended regarding the constituent order in a transitive clause in Spanish: for some authors Spanish is an SVO language, and for others, given its higher productivity, it is VO. It is my contention that, far from being arbitrary, the distribution between the two alternating structures can be seen to be mutually complementary. The aim of this paper is to show that both types of clauses are, in fact, motivated by the notions of topic and human reference, and that their different productivity is determined by grammatical rules directly related to the discursive structure of the text. Thus, in the case of an (S)VO order, a SVO clause involves a referent of S activated as a topic, as a result of which the following VO clause or clauses imply that their covert subject is already activated and, accordingly, Spanish grammar doesn’t require its phonetic realization. There cannot be a VO clause if its covert subject has not been previously activated.
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