A Cognitive Study Of English Inversion

English inversion, as a grammatical form, is a very important part of contemporary linguistic study. Traditionally, studies on word order try to account for it within the language itself, and English inversion is studied mainly from perspectives of rhetoric, syntax, pragmatic functions, texts and information distribution. Such studies are incomplete, because they neglect factors outside the language and fail to take into account the restriction of human cognition on word order.This thesis studies English inversion from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. The thesis first analyzes the word order of the SVO pattern by applying the prominence view, the result of which points to the fact that the word order of canonical sentences conform to the cognitive laws of native speakers. On the basis of the analysis, the thesis succeeds in accounting for the various kinds of inversion in English in terms of prominence and iconicity.The thesis points out that prominence is a property shared by the objects and events in the objective world that can catch the attention of the cognizer. It influences the cognizing order of the speaker and determines the word order of the sentences the speaker uses. The general rule is that the more prominent an object or a participant of an event is, the earlier it is cognized, and the earlier the form of its expression appears in the sentence. The thesis holds that the above relation between prominence and word order is the cognitive motivation of the canonical and inverted word orders of English sentences. According to the relation, the thesis provides cognitive explanations to the inverted elements in the initial position of the sentence by pointing out that they result from prominence of action, prominence of state, prominence of bearings, prominence of relation, prominence of degree, prominence of condition and prominence of negation.After explaining the inverted elements in the initial position, the thesis continues to explain the full and the partial inversion of the subject-verb construction in the sentence. It holds that proximity iconicity is the reason for the verb's being fully or partially shifted to the position before the subject when a prominent constituent is shifted to the initial position.The study conducted in the thesis indicates that it is possible to explain the word order of English inversion in the light of the relation between language and cognition within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Such a study can, on the one hand, prove the explaining force of the basic principles of cognitive linguistics, and, on the other hand, offer direct help to the understanding and use of English sentence patterns.