Certain word-order patterns are more basic and less marked than others. The more strongly marked a pattern seems to be in isolation, the stronger must be the contextual forces motivating its use, if it is to seem natural in a text. Various topicalizations (of adverbials, objects, and parts of verb phrases, for example) need various degrees of motivation. If the motives are strong enough, they may justify the textual fit even of strongly marked sentence patterns. One characteristic of poetic license is the freedom to use strongly marked thematic patterns. Different languages, even relatively closely related ones, give very different degrees of importance to the informational organization of the sentence. In foreign language teaching, differences in the handling of information flow in the course and target languages deserve more explicit attention, especially where the languages use different mechanisms. In translation, more information about the relative markedness of thematically different sentence patterns and about the forces improving or impairing textual fit would be helpful. (MSE)