Re: Verb-second ... verb-penultimate languages?

> It seems to me, however, that pushing the topic to the end of a
> sentence or clause is a very odd thing to do. There are examples of
> putting focus last, but that's a different matter & not all sentences
> have focus.
 In fact, it's not an odd thing to do at all. Topic, ultimately, just
means a generally well established referent central to the discourse...
such referents are commonly left towards the end of the clause in
languages with free word order when they are already fairly predictable.
It's typically *new* topics or topics being reestablished after a break
which occur at the start of the clause... old, established topics tend
to be left towards the end of the clause unless, of course, they're
simply realized by a zero anaphor.
 The reason that languages which grammaticalize topic-comment
constructions tend to put topics at the front of the clause is because
many of those same languages also realize established topics by zero (ie
drop them). So the only topics that explicitly occur are new, and thus
fronted. Even in these languages though, the trend for topics to occur
earlier when newer and more unpredictable, and later if they are more
established and predictable, can often be observed.
 An marginal example of a predictable topic left to the end in English
would be something like:

he left, john did

at least in my dialect of English, john is most definitely not focal or
contrastive in this construction, but rather it's so taken for granted
that john is the referent of he at the time of speaking that
establishing it is an afterthought. Of course, since English does not
have particularly free (=pragmatically based) word order, all examples
in English feel a little marked.
 A large number of languages with free word order have the basic rule:

NEW INFORMATION FIRST
OLD INFORMATION LAST

which naturally puts new topics first and old topics last.