| The thesis studies inversions in Pride and Prejudice from the discourse perspective. This thesis approaches the aim by means of extraction, classification and analysis of the inverted constructions form Pride and Prejudice. And the detailed discussion of discourse functions of each subtype of inversion are presented in this study.There are five chapters in this thesis. It is not watertight sufficiently not to present the previous contributions made by earlier scholars in discussing what they have done in the research of inversion. Thus, the second chapter centers around the theoretical background. Based on the account in Chapter 2, the inversions in Pride and Prejudice are classified into subtypes and their distributions and functions are toughed upon in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4, the discourse functions of inversion are presented and conclusion is made in Chapter 5.For a language to have an inversion construction presupposes that there is a basic pattern from which the order of subject and verb can invert. Thereby, the meaning of an inverted construction, in terms of its ideational content as well as its being word order deviant from the norm, additionally carries a communicative force due to that the use of inversion reflects the role of the writer as the organizer of the discourse structure, commentator and experiencer. So, the usage and function of inversion both add subjectivity as well as contributions to discourse structure. The contributions of FI and SAI to a discourse are nonetheless quite distinct. FI always involves some kind of localization. Both deictic presentative FI and lexical presentative possess the anaphoric property, which refers back to prior discourse entities to mark the succession between events and topics, actions and ideas. And the preposed constituents in an FI establish the anchoring of the new to the old ground . Furthermore, FI's topic-introducing device, topic-introducing, situation-setting, focus-highlighting, focus-contrasting and textual cohesion and coherence function in Pride and Prejudice show that they link units of discourse together, and direct the reader's attention , thus FI gain an interpersonal, discourse marker meaning. Furthermore, the old information does occur in the sentence final position, and it can be interpreted as the motivation of focus. On the other hand, this phenomenon is concerned with the recency of information. By contrast, thevarious SAI subtypes express that how the writer relates predications to each other; hence, SAI adds intervention on the part of the writer in the way she presents her material to any predication in which it occurs. Thereby, it inserts writer's evaluative purpose, and it is better characterized as a reflection of an overall subjective style. QI, in another way, also serves the same function in Pride and Prejudice, in which the typical use of QI is with the reporting clause occurring medially. This construction facilitates the writer to express her ideas freely by means of quotation, and unites the quotation as a whole. Thus, QI shares the subjective meaning with other inversion types since the meaning of these sentences, which nonetheless remain part of the predication itself, becomes increasingly based on the writer's own attitude and organization. Since the pronoun rarely occurs in inversion in modern English and it is of archaic usage , the tokens of QI with the pronoun, together with CI constructions, bring the written text an archaic flavor, which is also related to the notion of subjectivity.Heidrun (1997) compares FI and SAI of five text categories and finds that the distribution of inversion over these genres, and with that the degree to which the construction is relatively more or less expected, confirms the existence of such genre conventions and at the same time justifies calling inversion a marker of subjectivity and a discourse marker. And the comparison of frequency of inversion between the previous five text categories and Pride and Prejudice suggests that FI and SAI actually have a strong component of interpe...
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