Since the origins of modern linguistic studies (Weil 1844), the phenomenon of word order has been
considered essentially semantic and syntactic in its nature. In parallel, the philological inquiry on
classical texts has investigated the stylistic dimension: a fundamental attempt to reconcile the two
perspectives was that of Marouzeau (1922). In the second half of the twentieth century, the perspective
of typological linguistics was added, starting with Adams (1976), who tried to apply the
universals of Greenberg (1963). Recently, the methodologies of functional linguistics have spread
among the Latinists (Panhuis 1982; Spevak 2010, i.a.), and generative grammar has also proposed
new syntactic investigations (Salvi 2004; Devine & Stephens 2006; Ledgeway 2012, i.a.). In the
last years, the statements of ancient authors and the investigations of classical philologists on the
importance of sound and rhythm in the composition of the sentence have found a linguistic formalization
in the concept of “phonological movement” (Agbayani & Golston 2010, 2016). In this contribution
we intend to further investigate the validity of this perspective, showing new evidence
from the structure of the prepositional phrase, the phenomenon of alliteration, and the relationship
between word order and prosodic clausulae in Cicero.
