A Cognitive Study Of English Inversion

Inversion is a very common linguistic phenomenon in the English language. Given the rigidity of the English word order system, inversion represents a derivation from the canonical word order and bears an additional newsworthiness with marked status. Due to its astonishingly wide application, English inversion has always been one of the subjects of much interest of scholars both at home and abroad. The previous rhetoric, syntactic, pragmatic and cognitive studies have paved the way for the present cognitive study of inversion.As the starting-point of a sentence always influences the interpretation of everything that follows (Dorgeloh 1997: 7), the sentence initial position is cognitively salient. It gives an orientation or anchoring for what is to follow. Accordingly, the preverbal elements are the focus of the study of inversion. The previous studies concentrate on the parts of speech of the preverbal elements but result in a complex categorization. This thesis chooses the figure/ground cognitive model as a cut-in point to study inversion and solves the problems left by the previous studies.Based on Chen Rong's (2003) Ground-before-Figure (GbF) model, this thesis studies inversion within the framework of cognitive linguistics, puts forward a modified GbF model, explores the cognitive essence of inversion, and argues that inversion is a kind of cognitive mechanism in which the speaker changes the syntactic structure from figure-ground into ground-figure, i.e. from the subject-complement pattern into the complement-subject pattern. Based on the figure/ground theory, this thesis studies inversion in the light of the GbF model and argues that the preverbal elements represent the ground and the postverbal elements the figure. By such a linear order, inversion presents the ground first, in which the hearer finds a reference-point navigating for the search of the end figure. When the figure eventually appears at the end of the sentence, it is placed in the focus of the attention of the hearer. The figure has a higher status than the ground since the ground paves the way for the outcome of the figure. Moreover, based on the prototype theory, in this thesis, inversion is categorized as a radial classification with the prototype in the center and the extensions around the center. The prototype has two important elements: the spatiality in the semantics of the preverbal ground and the stativity in the semantics of the verb. Extensions from the prototype are viewed as gradual derivations from either of these two elements: one extension is produced from the ground in the prototype, and the other is generated from the verb. As a result, inversion is categorized as the prototype, the secondary-prototypical ones and the peripheral ones. In this way, inversion will be classified with a unified cognitive criterion.With a wide range of supportive examples and appropriate analysis, this cognitive study of inversion may help to enrich the research on inversion, shed light on the cognitive essence of the inverted construction. The present study also provides a unified account for the behaviors of inversion in its phonology, semantics, syntax, as well as pragmatics and demonstrates that the different levels of language are"a seamless whole"(Langacker 1991: 306). It proves that inversion is in line with the cognitive features and laws rather than violating the cognitive rules.