The purpose of this article is to investigate ways that the grammatical and semantic structures of the Finnish clause limit its possibilities for expressing information structure. The study aims to discover whether there is a correlation between the semantic structure of the sentence and the possibility of using the inverted word order for introducing new referents to the text, or whether there is free variation in the choice between the direct word order and the inverted one. Regularities in Finnish live ice hockey reporting are compared to those obtained by Tomlin (1983) and to results from other text types. Data are presented indicating that in some cases the semantic structure of the sentence rather than the information structure determines the word order. Contains 46 references. (LB)