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.
The book 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 reordering 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, genre. The results suggest a strong affinity with the greater or lesser subjectivity of a text: the construction is a marker of interpersonal meaning. Provided the context is one of relative unexpectedness, it additionally becomes a discourse marker, which points to the limited value of quantitative corpus data in functional syntax.
Ce numéro, réservé à un fait de langue plutôt qu'à une école théorique, s'adresse en priorité à tous ceux - étudiants de master ou de concours, chercheurs débutants ou confirmés - qui sont intéressés par la question de l'ordre des mots et de l'inversion du sujet (V-S ou LOC-V-S ou ADJ-V-S) dans la phrase assertive. Le but des responsables du volume (Christine Copy & Lucie Gournay) a été de regrouper dans un même recueil des articles ou des synthèses relevant d'approches différentes sur un phénomène qui est largement débattu en ce moment par un bon nombre de linguistes, en particulier par les linguistes énonciativistes. Au-delà des clivages théoriques, ou de la variété des disciplines, il a semblé pertinent de regrouper sous une même couverture les problématiques et les hypothèses formulées par les spécialistes de la question. En effet, toutes les contributions proviennent de chercheurs qui ont déjà travaillé sur des problèmes d'agencement de phrases. De plus, dans chaque contribution, il est fait mention des acquis des approches " adverses "... et l'on se rend compte que la confrontation va de pair avec une certaine complémentarité. Ainsi cet ouvrage a une double ambition : concerner tous ceux qui travaillent sur l'ordre des mots en français et en anglais, apporter une contribution non négligeable à la comparaison des idées en linguistique.
Users of natural languages have many word orders with which to encode the same truth-conditional meaning. They choose contextually appropriate strings from these many ways with little conscious effort and with effective communicative results. Previous computational models of when English speakers produce non-canonical word orders, like topicalization, left-dislocation and clefts, fail. The primary goal of this book is to present a better model of when speakers choose to produce certain non-canonical word orders by incorporating the effects of discourse context and speaker goals on syntactic choice. This book makes extensive use of previously unexamined naturally occurring corpus data of non-canonical word order in English, both to illustrate the points of the theoretical model and to train the statistical model.
This volume examines unresolved issues in iconicity and naturalness in language. The studies discuss topics such as naturalism in the philosophy of language and the epistemology of linguistics, linguistic iconicity in semiotics, iconic structures in Sign Languages, natural and unnatural sound patterns, the iconic nature of parts of speech, the relation between (un)markedness and naturalness, and lexical and syntactic iconicity.
This collection of papers on functional syntax shows the development of a specific stream of functional linguistics initiated by Susumu Kuno of Harvard University. Inspired by Prague School linguists such as Jan Firbas and Vilém Mathesius, Kuno developed a more comprehensive and theory-oriented approach and linked it with the American formalist approach of generative grammar. His approach is thus a unique combination of functionalism and formalism that constantly urges the promotion of interactions between these two major trends in linguistics. The papers in this collection coherently deal with functional aspects of linguistics from a wide variety of perspectives such as theoretical, applicational, experimental and diachronic aspects, incorporating the functional concept advocated by Kuno.
Review text: "Without a doubt, the volume in its entirety is inspiring. ... The articles are all written in an accessible style, so that the publication is suitable not only for experts, but also for students of linguistics. It is recommendable to all who want to broaden their horizons and embark on linguistic studies at the borders of traditional sub-disciplines."Sixta Quassdorf in: Linguist List 22.3028.
