Inversion in Modern English
Form and function
| University of Düsseldorf
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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Subjects & Metadata
BIC Subject: CF – Linguistics
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General