This lecture will provide a comparative analysis of word order in Spanish, French and Italian. I first consider word order in general, and show that Spanish has all types of word order except SOV (i.e. SVO, VOS, OSV, VSO and OVS), while Italian lacks SOV and VSO, and French lacks SOV, VSO and OVS. I argue that the different word order patterns can be accounted for as the result of a grammaticalization process, and provide evidence for a continuum from Spanish → Italian → French, Spanish being the least grammaticalized, and French the most grammaticalized language. In the second part of the lecture I will zoom in on the distribution of two particular types of word order shared by all three languages, VOS and VS. I will argue that, although VOS and VS are more restricted in French than in Spanish and Italian, the differences cannot be explained by a different parameter setting in French vs Italian and Spanish. Rather, French V(O)S is a ‘subset’ of Italian and Spanish V(O)S and the variation stems from semantic and register restrictions of the same construction. I will propose that this is a case of progressive grammaticalization with respect to the interface between syntax (the V(O)S word order) and information structure. The third part of the lecture will provide independent evidence for this claim, on the basis of the distribution of two types of cleft sentences, introduced by c’est / es / è and il y a / c’è, which are functional variants of V(O)S word order. This phenomenon, which developed in Romance as an innovative mechanism used to narrowly focus a constituent, shows the reversed pattern as the one observed for V(O)S: it is most developed in French, least in Spanish, and is progressing in modern Italian.