INVERSION IN WRITTEN AND SPOKEN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH docx

UNIVERSIDADE DE SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA FACULTADE DE FILOLOXÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOXÍA INGLESA I I N N V V E E R R S S I I O O N N I I N N W W R R I I T T T T E E N N A A N N D D S S P P O O K K E E N N C C O O N N T T E E M M P P O O R R A A R R Y Y E E N N G G L L I I S S H H José Carlos Prado Alonso 2007 Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Facultade de Filoloxía Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa I I N N V V E E R R S S I I O O N N I I N N W W R R I I T T T T E E N N A A N N D D S S P P O O K K E E N N C C O O N N T T E E M M P P O O R R A A R R Y Y E E N N G G L L I I S S H H Tesis doctoral realizada por José Carlos Prado Alonso y supervisada por los doctores María Teresa Fanego Lema y Juan Carlos Acuña Fariña Visto bueno de los directores: Fdo. José Carlos Prado Alonso Fdo. Dra. María Teresa Fanego Lema Fdo. Dr. Juan Carlos Acuña Fariña ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In undertaking research of this nature, one naturally seeks out the intellectual and personal support of a great many people, perhaps, more people than it would be possible to mention. Nevertheless, I will attempt here to express my gratitude to most of them. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisors, Professors Teresa Fanego and Carlos Acuña, not only for their academic guidance and keen intellectual judgement but also for their patience, constant encouragement, and in particular for their help during difficult moments of the project. The research reported here is part of a larger project – Variation, Linguistic Change, and Grammaticalisation – sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (grants nos. HUM2004-00940 and HUM 2007-60706), the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant no. PGIDITO5 PXIC20401PN), and the European Regional Development Fund. The support of these institutions, as well as the positive feedback of the members of the research group throughout the course of this investigation, is hereby also gratefully acknowledged. I owe my deepest gratitude to Christian Mair for inspiring me to actually begin this dissertation. Others scholars who helped me out and whom I feel very grateful to are Betty Birner and Gregory Ward, and especially Rolf Kreyer who was kind enough to allow me access to his (then) unpublished work. Thank you Rolf for sharing with me your valuable contributions to the study of full inversion. This work has profited from your comments and suggestions. Likewise, I feel greatly indebted to all my colleagues at the Department of English in the University of Santiago de Compostela for their encouragement over the years. Thanks also to Susi, Susana, Bea, Tere, Cris, Lidia, Marta, Antonio, Pablo, Rúa, Bego, María, and Ricardo for your concern, your priceless friendship, and for your enormous affection at all times. None of this would have been possible without the constant help and encouragement of my parents and, especially, of my brother Miguel. Thank you for being patient, for looking after me, for always being “there” and for your everlasting faith and trust in me. Last but not least, a very special thank goes to Ana. Thanks Ana for your unfailing help, unconditional support, immense patience and for encouraging me when the going got especially tough. Without your care and your unyielding faith this work would have been harder. Santiago de Compostela, November 2007 The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, ‘For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.’ The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, ‘From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.’ Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES v LIST OF FIGURES viii INTRODUCTION 1 1. FULL-VERB INVERSION IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH: A PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT 5 1.1 Definition 5 1.2 Types of inversion excluded from the analysis 6 1.2.1 Subject-operator inversion 7 1.2.2 Inversion in conditional clauses and formulaic expressions 9 1.2.3 Inversion in interrogative and exclamative clauses 10 1.2.4 Additional types of inversion excluded 11 1.2.5 Quotation or journalistic style inversion 11 1.3 A classification of full inversion based on formal criteria 13 1.4 Some structural patterns related to full inversion 22 1.4.1 Existential-‘there’ 24 1.4.2 Preposing 28 1.4.3 Left-dislocation 30 1.4.4. Equatives 32 2. RESEARCH ON FULL INVERSION 35 2.1 Syntactic accounts 37 2.2 Functional accounts 41 2.2.1 The textual or discourse-related account 41 2.2.2 The information-packaging account 50 2.3 Point of view and focus management: dorgeloh (1997) 60 2.4 Syntactic complexity and information status: kreyer (2004) 67 2.5 Full inversion as a ground-before-figure construction: chen (2003) 84 2.6 Summary and conclusions 99 i 3. SURVEY OF THE CORPORA 104 3.1 The written corpora: FLOB and FROWN 104 3.2 The spoken corpora: ICE-GB and CSPAE 109 3.3 Database design: sampling the corpus 115 3.3.1 Sampling the written data 116 3.3.2 Sampling the spoken data 124 3.4 Methodology: manual vs. automated searching systems 126 3.4.1 Automated search strategies: ICE-GB and ICECUP 3.0 128 3.4.2 The retrieval of full inversions on the basis of a parsed corpus 129 4. FULL-VERB INVERSION IN PRESENT-DAY WRITTEN AND SPOKEN ENGLISH 131 4.1 Full inversion in present-day written English: obligatory and non-obligatory uses 131 4.1.1 Obligatory full inversion in fiction and non-fiction 139 4.1.2 Non-obligatory full inversion in fiction and non-fiction 149 4.1.2.1 Prepositional phrase, adverb phrase and verb phrase inversions in fiction and non-fiction: spatial experiential iconic markers and text- structuring devices 154 4.1.2.2 Noun phrase, adjective phrase, and subordinator inversions in fiction and non-fiction: text-structuring devices 169 4.1.3 Summary and conclusions 182 4.2 Full inversion in present-day spoken English: obligatory and non-obligatory uses 186 4.2.1 Obligatory full inversion in spoken English 189 4.2.2 Non-obligatory full inversion in spoken English 198 4.2.2.1 Prepositional phrase, adverb phrase and verb phrase inversions in spoken English: spatial experiential iconic markers and text-structuring devices 201 4.2.2.2 Noun phrase, adjective phrase, and subordinator inversions in spoken English: text-structuring devices 205 4.2.3 Summary and conclusions 207 4.3 Prospects for future research: full inversions as constructions 209 ii [...]... of inversion excluded from the corpus results, namely subject-operator inversion (cf 1.2.1), inversion in conditional clauses and in formulaic expressions (cf 1.2.2), inversion in exclamative and interrogative clauses (cf 1.2.3), inversion after a negated verb, inversion with temporal phrases, inversion in appended clauses (cf 1.2.4), and quotation inversion (cf 1.2.5) 2 1.2.1 SUBJECT-OPERATOR INVERSION. .. subject-dependent inversion, whereas Quirk et al (1985) and Biber et al (1999) label it subject-verb inversion, and Green (1985) and Stein (1995) speak of inversion- over-verb and Type-A inversion, respectively Likewise, Huddleston and Pullum (2002) speak of subjectauxiliary inversion or partial inversion instead of subject-operator inversion, while Green (1985) refers to inversion- over-auxiliary and Stein (1995)... that full inversion occurs mainly in written discourse, but these claims have not yet been backed up by a detailed corpus-based analysis The in- depth analysis of full inversion in the spoken language provided in this study will demonstrate that full inversion also occurs in 1 the spoken language, and that speech and writing do not differ greatly in the amount of full inversions used, but rather in the... inversion in the spoken corpora 198 Figure 31 Prepositonal, adverb, and verb phrase full inversions in the written and spoken corpora (frequencies normalised per 100,000 words) …201 Figure 32 Noun phrase, adjective phrase, and subordinator full inversions in the written and spoken corpora (frequencies normalised per 100,000 words) …205 ix INTRODUCTION Over the past few years, full-verb inversion, ... to inversion in declarative clauses Inversion in both independent and dependent interrogative clauses is therefore beyond the scope of this study Independent interrogatives trigger verb-subject inversion (17) Dependent-interrogative clauses, by contrast, are normally followed by SVO word-order (cf 18), yet they may also occur with inversion of subject and verb in informal registers, as can be seen in. .. the spoken corpora Chapter 5 contains a summary and the main conclusions reached in this investigation Finally, Appendices I, II, and III contain the database and a more detailed description of the samples analysed in the computerised corpora 3 1 FULL-VERB INVERSION IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH: A PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT The term inversion has been used to refer to different, although related, constructions in. .. B26) Finally, the kinds of opening elements occurring in full inversion are much more diverse than those in subject-operator inversion, which is syntactically obligatory when certain elements occur in clause-initial position Full and subject-operator inversion are considered marked constructions in Present-day English and are alternatives to the basic SVO word-order, but the 8 way in which they behave... (14) May the rain fall soft upon your fields (15) Until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand 9 In English, the use of inversion with formulaic expressions is largely restricted to formal registers but, as shown in (16), it may also occur marginally in informal contexts (16) Long live Rock and Roll! (FROWN, adventure and western N23) 1.2.3 INVERSION IN INTERROGATIVE AND EXCLAMATIVE... full inversions occurring in each of those media and in the functions full inversion serves The corpora used to analyse the behaviour and distribution of full inversion in written and spoken texts were the Freiburg-Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus of British English (FLOB; compilation date: 1991), the Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English (FROWN; compilation date: 1992), the International Corpus of English: ... verb of the clause and, when it occurs in an inverted construction, it seems reasonable to consider it an instance of full inversion 5 Pro-forms and additive adverbs (cf 38) followed by the inversion of the subject and the main verb of the clause will therefore be regarded as instances of adverb phrase inversion in this dissertation Full inversions following correlative connectives, as in (33) above, will . full inversions on the basis of a parsed corpus 129 4. FULL-VERB INVERSION IN PRESENT-DAY WRITTEN AND SPOKEN ENGLISH 131 4.1 Full inversion in. 1.2.1 Subject-operator inversion 7 1.2.2 Inversion in conditional clauses and formulaic expressions 9 1.2.3 Inversion in interrogative and exclamative clauses