Sentences have a particular ‘communicative sense’ in that they are used to express different kinds of statements. A distinction may be drawn between sentence types expressing locational, existential-locative, and source-emergence statements. Each type is associated with a characteristic information structure, which is manifest in a particular intonation patterning and sequential ordering of elements. The ordering of sentence elements in English and German is subject to different sets of criteria, and one set of criteria is seen to have more relevance in the one language than it has in the other. An attempt is made to establish a basic, ‘systemic’ ordering of participants in the two languages in terms of the case functions expressed by noun phrases in different semantic sentence patterns. Due consideration is given to the different options available, and to the different constraints that apply, in the surface ordering of elements in the two languages under investigation.