The Discourse Function of Inversion in English
| By: | Betty Birner |
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Print ISBN: | 9781138967755 |
| eText ISBN: | 9781136753978 |
| Edition: | 1 |
| Copyright: | 1996 |
| Format: | Reflowable |
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First published in 1997. This dissertation presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an empirical study of natural language data. The central finding is that inversion is subject to a pragmatic constraint on the information status of its constituents; specifically, the information represented by the preposed constituent must be at least as familiar within the discourse as is that represented by the postposed constituent.