A Cognitive Study Of English Inversions

The present thesis tries to analyze full inversions in English within the framework of cognitive linguistics. On the basis of figure/ground theory, the thesis focuses on the following aspects: the cognitive mechanism of full inversions, the categorization and properties of full inversions.The cognitive model presented is the Ground-before-Figure (GbF) model, which asserts that sometimes it is cognitively efficient to present a ground before a figure. Inversions are seen as a linguistic instantiation of this model: the preverbal constituent of inversions represents the ground, the postverbal subject NP the figure. By such a linear order of presentation, inversions direct the hearer's attention to the ground first, in which the hearer finds a reference point established in the previous text or in the discourse context. When the figure eventually appears, it is placed in the focus of attention of the hearer. Based on this model, full inversions are classified into three types: LOC BE, PATH Vm and NSPAT BE. This cognitive analysis can provide explanations for the various syntactic properties of the construction, such as the polarity constraint, the transitivity constraint, the embeddedness constraint and the auxiliary constraint.It is hoped that the study will help to understand better the cognitive process of inversions and to grasp the correct use of inversions in language practice. It is also hoped that such an effort will be of great help to the understanding of the relationships between language and cognition.