Word order in Slovene as a natural reflection of thematic structure

Professor Janez Orešnik was, of course, very interested in Slovene as his mother tongue, but he more confidently incorporated it into his linguistic research only in his later years. This was probably also due to a certain respectful attitude towards the Slovene and Slavic scholars of the time, his contemporaries, whom he considered to be more qualified than he to make certain analyses and judgements about the language. Until the end, however, he drew our attention above all to the research deficit in Slovenian syntax, which included the treatment of word order. This paper deals with the formulation of the topical-articulatory word order in Slovene in relation to verb conjugation and the verbal string as a syntactic-prose unit. The chosen communicative perspective determines the word order and in connection with each functional perspective it is necessary to identify the communicative elements and determine their possible positions in the sentence in the narrative process. In this, the verb has a narratively stable and therefore crucial role. In particular, interpropositionality and, with it, contextuality are established and maintained by the clitic cluster. By maintaining the typical sentence structure of subject-verb-object, the clitic cluster serves as a kind of micro-contextual sentence within the actual sentence.