Abstract

In this article the author investigates the phenomenon of word order in English and Serbian. Though most of the grammarians would say that Serbian word order is free, while the English one is fixed, word order in English and Serbian still share some properties. Hovewer, due to their different nature, Serbian being a synthetic language vs. English as an analytic one, word order seems to have dissimilar functional values in the two languages. In English it is the main syntactic means, while in Serbian it is mainly a pragmatic, textual and stylistic means. So, in the grammaring-triangle, from meaning and use , it is only that the form is the same - their meaning and use are different in the two languages, making them more a homonymic language phenomenon than anything else