A comprehensive account of full-verb inversion in English

Carlos Prado-Alonso; J. Carlos Acuña-Fariña

doi:10.1515/flin.2010.018

Article

A comprehensive account of full-verb inversion in English

Carlos Prado-Alonso and J. Carlos Acuña-Fariña

Published/Copyright: December 8, 2010

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From the journal Volume 44 Issue 2

Despite the abundant corpus-based research on full-inversion constructions in which the subject follows the entire verb phrase in a declarative clause, the analysis of this construction in the spoken mode has traditionally been neglected since it has been suggested that natural speech is not a good source of inversions. The article shows that speech, too, can be a good source of data for full inversion and that the spoken and the written modes do not differ in the overall distribution of the construction but rather in the types of inversion used and in the pragmatic functions these inversions serve in discourse. The article also casts light on the lack of consensus regarding the distribution of full inversion in written fictional and non-fictional texts, and in the pragmatic function the construction serves in both genres.

Keywords:: corpus linguistics; word order; inversion; pragmatics; iconicity

Received: 2009-12-18

Accepted: 2010-02-15

Published Online: 2010-12-08

Published in Print: 2010-December

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2010.018

Keywords for this article

corpus linguistics; word order; inversion; pragmatics; iconicity