English Inversion: A Cognitive Approach

The interface study of syntax-semantics is one of the important approaches in modern linguistics. The linearization of language has people notice the sequence order of linguistic signs first. One can find that from the primitive manual speeches to the artificial signs, each follows its own sequence order. As a marked word order structure, inversion has its own special meaning. For the inverted phenomena of language, inversion has always been noticed by the language researchers at home and abroad. Traditionally, when people analyze inversion, they mainly do their studies from the levels of rhetoric, syntax, pragmatics, discourse functions or information transition. Among those scholars, Xu Shenghuan (1995, 1996), Zhang Keding (2001, 2002), Wen Xu & Liu Xianqing (2004), Birner (1994, 1996), Dorgeloh (1997) and Chen Rong (2003) are the desirable ones.As a new approach, cognitive linguistics is the study of language based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it and the study of the human language with consciousness knowledge (Ungerer & Schmid, 1996), which provides us a new model to review and understand language. This thesis, within the framework of cognitive linguistics, explores the realization in linguistic phenomena of figure and ground, which is studied by the gestalt psychologists, based on Chen Rong's GbF (2003) model and the research of Wen Xu & Liu Xianqing (2004), studies inversion further from the perspective of prototype theory and figure-ground theory and argues that...