The master’s thesis deals with the Slovene and English word order. It defines the theoretical background of word order and the main terms, such as sentence, clause, sentence elements, phrases, and sentence structures of both languages. The theoretical part studies fixed and free word order, with greater emphasis on the so-called functional sentence perspective principle, founded in the 20th century by Vilém Mathesius in the tradition of the Prague School of Linguistics. Anton Breznik is an important forerunner of the Slovene theory of Prague’s functional sentence perspective. However, Jože Toporišič and several other Slovene linguists also wrote in more detail about the functional sentence perspective principle. The previously mentioned Vilém Mathesius wrote about English word order with an emphasis on free word order, and this thesis also mentions the Czech linguist Jan Firbas, who coined the term functional sentence perspective, and the linguist M. A. K. Halliday. With the help of the contrastive analysis, the theoretical foundation is applied to the analysis of selected Slovene articles and their English translations. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to compare the word order principles of both languages and by analysing individual clauses prove that word order in Slovene is more flexible than in English.
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