Behaghel's laws

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Behaghel's laws are rules about how words and phrases are placed in a sentence. Otto Behaghel introduced them in the final volume of Deutsche Syntax (written 1923–1932). A key idea is that the most important information tends to come at the end of the sentence, helping listeners remember it. These laws helped develop the later concept of theme and rheme and are used as ideas for quantitative linguistics research. One well-known part is the law of increasing terms, also called Panini's law, a name given by William Cooper and John Ross in 1975 when studying English set phrases like “free and easy,” “lock, stock and barrel,” and “kit and caboodle.” A similar pattern has been noted in Biblical Hebrew poetry (Michael O’Connor, 1978).