Text Structuring in Written English: The Role of Inversion

Abstract

Full-verb inversion constructions in which the subject follows the entire verb phrase in a declarative clause—as in “At the top of each Ministry was a British adviser” or “Here, in otherwise total darkness, shone a single square of light”—have been the subject of extensive research in recent years, the focus of different studies varying according to the nature and goals of the specific theoretical framework adopted. On the basis of the kind of phrasal category occurring as clause-initial constituent, five different types of full inversion have traditionally been distinguished in the literature: noun phrase, adverb phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, and prepositional phrase full inversion. Broadly speaking, analyses of full-verb inversion carried out within the generative and functional paradigms have focused mainly on inversions following a locative constituent, which subsumes spatial locations, path, and directions, and their extension to some temporal and abstract locative domains. In this sense, they neglect the analysis of those full inversion types, namely noun phrase and adjective phrase full inversion, which do not normally contain such clause-initial constituents. In order to bridge this gap, the present paper offers a corpus-based analysis of noun phrase inversion in present-day written English texts. It is argued that the distribution of the construction is related to the degree of abstractness of its texts, and that noun phrase inversion can be considered a syntactic device that codes abstract relations.