Birner Betty J. The Discourse Function of Inversion in English

Garland Publishing Inc, 1996. — 204 p. — ASIN B00XTAS4CO.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. Thus, what is relevant for felicitous inversion is the relative, rather than the absolute, status of these two constituents; moreover, the constraint makes reference to the status of this information within the discourse, as opposed to the (assumed) knowledge store of the hearer. Distinguishing among these factors-i.e., familiarity to the hearer vs. familiarity within the discourse, and relative vs. absolute familiarity-makes it possible to formulate a single pragmatic constraint that accounts for all of the data in the corpus. Of more than 1700 tokens in the corpus, in no case does the preposed constituent represent newer information within the discourse than does the postposed constituent. Based on this finding, it is proposed that inversion serves the information-packaging function of allowing the presentation of relatively familiar information before relatively unfamiliar information...