Empirical evidence is provided for the existence of a discourse-related area between TP and vP in Jordanian Arabic (JA), a finding which is in line with Belletti’s (2004, 2005) model of the low IP area in natural languages. A two million-word corpus of naturally occurring data from JA, supported by grammaticality judgements from 50 JA speakers, reveals that the subject in VSO clauses of JA is mostly either a definite DP or a modified, indefinite DP, implying that a certain informational value (i.e., a topic or a focus) is assigned to the post-verbal subject in such clauses. Another piece of evidence, among many others, that substantiates this line of analysis comes from the distributional properties of the subject in VSO clauses with respect to the past tense copula ka:n ‘was’ and high vP adverbials. The subject appears to the right of the former but to the left of the latter. We take this as a good indication that the subject in VSO clauses moves to a structural position higher than vP adverbials, yet lower than T0. In order to account for the reason why the subject does not raise to Spec,TP in VSO clauses in JA, we adopt the Criterial Freezing approach to movement and chain formation (Rizzi 2004, 2005, 2006, 2014; Rizzi and Shlonsky 2007). Criterial positions, whose heads are endowed with a specific informational feature such as [TOP] or [FOC], are traps. The subject landing in Spec, Topic Phrase or Spec, Focus Phrase (of the low IP area) gets frozen in place, obtaining, as a result, the VSO word order on the surface.