Inversion in Modern English
Form and function
Author
The book offers a comprehensive study of the different forms of subject-verb and subject-auxiliary-inversion in Modern English declarative sentences. It treats inversion as a speaker-based decision for reordering within a fairly rigid word order system and identifies the meaning of the construction in terms of point of view and speaker subjectivity. This semantic claim is tested against the occurrence, as well as the absence, of the different forms of inversion in natural discourse.
The analysis of the pragmatics and discourse function of inversion is based on the LOB and the Brown corpus and takes into account various textual relations: British and American English, written mode, style, text type, genre. The results suggest a strong affinity with the greater or lesser subjectivity of a text: the construction is a marker of interpersonal meaning. Provided the context is one of relative unexpectedness, it additionally becomes a discourse marker, which points to the limited value of quantitative corpus data in functional syntax.
The analysis of the pragmatics and discourse function of inversion is based on the LOB and the Brown corpus and takes into account various textual relations: British and American English, written mode, style, text type, genre. The results suggest a strong affinity with the greater or lesser subjectivity of a text: the construction is a marker of interpersonal meaning. Provided the context is one of relative unexpectedness, it additionally becomes a discourse marker, which points to the limited value of quantitative corpus data in functional syntax.
[Studies in Discourse and Grammar, 6] 1997. x, 236 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Abbreviations | p. vii
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1. Introduction | p. 1
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2. Word order in English: Some theoretical preliminaries | p. 7
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3. Inversion in English: The state of the art | p. 19
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4. The semantics of inversion | p. 63
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5. Inversion in discourse | p. 125
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6. Summary and conclusion | p. 193
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Appendix | p. 201
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Notes | p. 204
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Index | p. 225
“[...] this book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on functional aspects of inversion in Modern English.”
Peter Erdmann, Technical University of Berlin
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2005. Reviews. <i>WORD</i> 56:1 ► pp. 71 ff. 
Copy, Christine & Lucie Gournay
2009. Locative Inversion In Discourse: a strategy of non-commitment. Discours :5
DE WIT, ASTRID
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De Wit, Astrid
2018. The semantics of the simple tenses and full-verb inversion in English. Constructions and Frames 10:2 ► pp. 210 ff.
Dorgeloh, Heidrun
2004. Conjunction in sentence and discourse: sentence-initial and and discourse structure. Journal of Pragmatics 36:10 ► pp. 1761 ff.
Duffley, Patrick
2016. The role of DO-auxiliary in subject-auxiliary inversion: Developing Langacker’s notion of existential negotiation. Cognitive Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 269 ff.
Iwasaki, Shoichi
2015. A multiple-grammar model of speakers’ linguistic knowledge. Cognitive Linguistics 26:2 ► pp. 161 ff.
Jacobsson, Bengt
2007. A New Look at Negative and Correlative Subject–Auxiliary Inversion in English. Studia Neophilologica 79:1 ► pp. 35 ff.
KOIKE, KOJI
2017. THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEGATIVE-INITIAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH. ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 33:2 ► pp. 307 ff.
Lu, Wei-lun
2020. Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7:2 ► pp. 334 ff.
Marcus, Imogen
2018. Prose Structure. In The Linguistics of Spoken Communication in Early Modern English Writing, ► pp. 135 ff.
Prado-Alonso, Carlos
2011. Text Structuring in Written English: The Role of Inversion. English Studies 92:4 ► pp. 449 ff.
Prado-Alonso, Carlos
2014. Verb Phrase Inversion in Fictional and Non-Fictional Written English. English Studies 95:2 ► pp. 177 ff.
Prado-Alonso, Carlos
2016. A Constructional Analysis of Obligatory XVS Syntactic Structures. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 51:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Prado-Alonso, Carlos
2019. Obligatory inversion in scientific texts. Studia Neophilologica 91:3 ► pp. 314 ff.
Prado-Alonso, Carlos
2019. A comprehensive corpus-based analysis of “X Auxiliary Subject” constructions in written and spoken English. Topics in Linguistics 20:2 ► pp. 17 ff.
SHIZAWA, TAKASHI
2015. THE RHETORICAL EFFECT OF LOCATIVE INVERSION CONSTRUCTIONS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE THREE-TIER MODEL OF LANGUAGE USE. ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 32:1 ► pp. 156 ff.
Vlasko, Natal’ya Konstantinovna, Galina Grigor’evna Gurova & Tamara Il’inichna Kuznetsova
2019. EMPHATIC INVERSION AS A MEANS OF LOGICAL EMPHASIS AND COHESION IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DISCOURSE. Philological Sciences. Issues of Theory and Practice :4 ► pp. 24 ff.
Vorobyova, Ye. N.
2021. Corpus-Based Research of Simple Non-Inverted Pronominal Interrogative Constructions in English. Bulletin of Kemerovo State University 23:2 ► pp. 477 ff.
Wyld, Henry
2021. Degrés de subjectivisation dans la représentation linguistique de la perception : le cas de la perception directe dans les récits en anglais. Anglophonia :31
Yeung, Lorrita
[no author supplied]
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Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General