Verb-Subject order is often claimed to be the surface expression of thetic utterances, which are supposed to be ontologically different from the classical Aristotelian categoric type: thetic utterances are not divided in two parts (subject and predicate, topic and comment), but represent the information they convey as a cognitive whole. The purpose of the present study is to offer a detailed description of the clauses with this word order in Albanian, Greek, and Serbo-Croat, in which the verb-subject strategy is a very prominent one, and, based on these data, to reexamine the postulates of the theory of two basic utterance types. The results may be subsumed in two claims: (1) The equation "VS = thetic" does not hold true, because subject postponement is a distinctive feature of at least three constructions, which I labeled Inversion, VsX-Construction and vS-Construction. Of these, only the latter resembles what is usually called thetic. (2) The existence of a non-categoric utterance type does not automatically follow from the existence of vS-Construction, since this construction also displays a specific kind of topic-comment articulation, explainable in terms of certain word order and intonation rules of the three languages in question
