Article published in:
Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 8:3 (2018) ► pp. 318–355

The origin of English clause-initial quotative inversion

| University of Łódź
This study is a corpus-based investigation of the development of English clause-initial quotative inversion, i.e. the construction in which a reporting clause with SV inversion is placed before the quoted message. The analysis makes use of various corpora of historical and contemporary English in order to document quantity and quality changes in the investigated construction in all stages of English. The study shows that the construction observed in Present Day English has developed in a continuous way since the period of Old English, although it has been a low-frequency pattern in each historical period. Moreover, the construction has developed differently in British and American English. In the former variety, the clause-initial quotative inversion is still quite rare and limited to newspapers, mostly tabloids; in the latter, it is quite widespread in magazines, where it shows an exceptionally high frequency and a growing collocational range.
Keywords: clause-initial quotative inversion, reporting constructions, diachronic development, English syntax
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Study design
  • 3.Old English
  • 4.Middle English
  • 5.Early Modern English
  • 6.Late Modern British English
  • 7.Contemporary British English
  • 8.American English
  • 9.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Corpora and scripts
  • References
Published online: 13 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17002.cic
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Cichosz, Anna
2020. Negation and Verb-initial Order in Old English Main Clauses. Journal of English Linguistics 48:4 ► pp. 355 ff. Crossref logo

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