A Study Of Obligatory Inversion In English From The Perspective Of The Prominence View

Inversion in English is classified into optional inversion and obligatory inversion. Previous studies on inversion mainly focus on optional inversion. Few studies have been made on obligatory inversion because it has been regarded as fixed sentence patterns, which are taken for granted and thought not to need any explanation. This thesis has looked into the reflection, nature and cognitive motivation of obligatory inversion in English, and has provided systematic accounts of it from the perspective of the prominence view.Obligatory inversion in English refers to the syntactic phenomenon that the predicate verb must be wholly or partly placed before the subject of the sentence, specifically referring to the inversion involved in interrogative sentences, sentences expressing wishes, conditional clauses without If, sentences beginning with So/Neither/Nor and sentences beginning with Here/There/Now/Then.Obligatory inversion in English is by nature grammaticalized or fossilized inversion. Like optional inversion, obligatory inversion in English is also the product of human cognition, and its cognitive motivation is cognitive prominence:the change in the degree of prominence of related things or information leads to the change in the order of cognition, which in turn leads to the change in the word order of the sentence. When the changed word order is grammaticalized or fossilized, obligatory inversion or fixed sentence patterns of inversion come into existence in English.On the basis of the analysis of the nature and motivation of obligatory inversion, this thesis has, from the perspective of the prominence view, accounted for the obligatory inversion in interrogative sentences, sentences expressing wishes, conditional clauses without If, sentences beginning with So/Neither/Nor and sentences beginning with Here/There/Now/Then. The result shows that the obligatory inversion in these sentence patterns all results from the influence on the prominence of related things or related information:the obligatory inversion in interrogative sentences and sentences expressing wishes results from the influence of the change of subjective attention or emotion on prominence, and that in conditional clauses without If, sentences beginning with So/Neither/Nor and sentences beginning with Here/There/Now/Then results from the influence of known things or given information on the prominence.The study conducted in this thesis proves that obligatory inversion and optional inversion in English are cognitively motivated in the same way, so it is also possible to explain obligatory inversion in English from the perspective of the prominence view.