1st Edition

The Discourse Function of Inversion in English

By Betty Birner Copyright 1996
204 Pages
by Routledge

204 Pages
by Routledge

204 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more
Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Definition and Preliminary Taxonomy; Chapter 3 Previous Analyses; Chapter 4 The Function of Inversion; Chapter 5 Verbs and Related Issues; Chapter 6 Summary and Conclusions;

Biography

Birner, Betty