Overview

This text 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 re-ordering 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, and genre. The results suggest a strong affinity with the greater or lesser subjectivity of a text, implying that the construction is a marker of impersonal meaning. The work argues that provided the context is one of relative unexpected, it additionally becomes a discourse marker, which points to the limited value of quantitive corpus data in functional syntax.

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9789027226167

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[...] 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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