Cover not available
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
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17002.cic
References

Corpora and scripts

Davies, Mark
2004 BYU-BNC, Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press. Available at [URL]
2010 The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Available at [URL]
Gries, Stefan Th
2007 Coll.analysis 3.2a. A Program for R for Windows 2.x.Google Scholar
Hardie, Andrew
2008–2016 CQPweb – Corpus Query Processor. University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language. Lancaster University. Available at [URL]
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini & Lauren Delfs
2004 The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini & Ariel Diertani
2016 The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor
2000 The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
R Core Team
2014 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Available at [URL]
Randall, Beth, Antony Kroch & Ann Taylor
2005–2013 CorpusSearch 2.Google Scholar
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths
2003 The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). Department of Linguistics, University of York. Oxford Text Archive.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Cichosz, Anna
2017a Old English Verbs of Saying and Verb-Initial Order. English Language and Linguistics 21:3.533–558. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017b Verb-Initial Main Clauses in Bede: A Translation Effect? Current Developments in English Historical Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Professor Rafał Molencki ed. by Andrzej Kijak, Jerzy Nykiel & Andrzej M. Łęcki, 68–89. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.Google Scholar
2018 Parenthetical Reporting Clauses in the History of English: The Development of Quotative Inversion. English Language and Linguistics. Available online. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cichosz, Anna, Jerzy Gaszewski & Piotr Pęzik
2016 Element Order of Old English and Old High German Translations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman & Wim van der Wurff
2000 The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fowler, H. W.
1965 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ikeda, Takuro
1992 Eigo buntairon [English Stylistics: A Practical Synthesis]. Tokyo: Kenkyusha.Google Scholar
Konno, Masatoshi
2013 Inverted Reporting Verbs in the Sentence-Initial Position in English. Token: A Journal of English Linguistics 21.149–168.Google Scholar
Kruisinga, Etsko
1922 A Handbook of Present-Day English. Utrecht: Kemink & Zoom.Google Scholar
Mikulová, Jana
2015 Verbs Introducing Direct Speech in Late Latin Texts. Graeco-Latina Brunensia 20:2.123–143.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce
1985 Old English Syntax. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moore, Colette
2011 Quoting Speech in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2015 Histories of Talking about Talk: Quethen, Quoth, Quote . The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then ed. by Jenny Aendholz, Wolfram Bublitz & Monika Kimer-Lundwig. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ohkado, Masayuki
2000 Verb First Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People . Synchronic and Diachronic Studies on Language: A Festschrift for Dr. Hirozo Nakano ed. by Masachiyo Amano & Hirozo Nakano, 263–278. Nagoya: Nagoya University.Google Scholar
2004 On the Structure and Function of V1 Constructions in Old English. English Studies 851.2–16. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 Clause Structure in Old English. University of Amsterdam PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Petrova, Svetlana
2006 A Discourse-Based Approach to Verb Placement in Early West-Germanic. Working Papers of the SFB 632 ed. by Shinichiro Ishihara, Michaela Schmitz & Anne Schwarz, 153–182. (= Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS), 15.) Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Sams, Jessie
2009 Genre-Controlled Constructions in Written Language Quotatives: A Case Study of English Quotatives from Two Major Genres. Formulaic Language, Vol. 1: Distribution and Historical Change ed. by Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali & Kathleen Wheatley, 147–169. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sonoda, Kenji
1997 Subject-Verb Inversion before a Quotation in the Media Discourse. Current English Studies 361.13–25.Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan T. Gries
2003 Collostructions: Investigating the Interaction Between Words and Constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8:2.209–243.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale
2013 Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wårvik, Brita
2011 Connective or “Disconnective” Discourse Marker? Old English þa, Multifunctionality and Narrative Structuring. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Vol. 8: Connectives in Synchrony and Diachrony in European Languages ed. by Anneli Meurman-Solin & Ursula Lenker. Helsinki: VARIENG. Available at [URL]
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. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.