INFORMATION STATUS AND WORD-ORDER - AN ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH INVERSION

This paper presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally-occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function, and that feliCitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed constituents. The data moreover indicate that evoked elements and inferrable elements are treated alike with respect to inversion: both are treated as discourse-old information. Finally, it is suggested that discourse-familiarity correlates not with subjecthood, but rather with relative sentence position.*