The paper examines the way declarative sentences are introduced in a text in two closely related languages – Norwegian and German. It aims to reveal to what extent the languages under investigation are similar when it comes to meaning construal in this respect and which mechanisms may be classified as language specific. For the purposes of the study, the Norwegian item DET, which possesses multiple functions in sentence openings, has been chosen as a point of departure in a detailed contrastive analysis based on translation data taken from a parallel corpus. The research shows clear similarities in word order between Norwegian and German in sentence openings. However, in German, the notional subject, complex adverbials and even objects, are clearly preferred as thematic and most prominent parts of an event, while they typically appear in the sentence-final position in Norwegian. These differences in meaning construal are explained on the basis of different perspectives adopted in German and Norwegian – a narrow point of view in the former and a distant one in the latter.