Pragmatic constraints on the verb in English inversion

Abstract

Many researchers have argued that the verbs appearing in English inversion can be characterized as belonging to a particular syntactic or semantic class. For example, it has been claimed that such verbs are exclusively unaccusative (Levin, 1983; Coopmans, 1989; Hoekstra and Mulder, 1990; Watanabe, 1994, inter alia), exclusively presentational (e.g., Bresnan, 1994), or exclusively verbs of existence or appearance (e.g., Penhallurick, 1984). A study of a large corpus of natural language data, however, indicates that these restrictions do not account for the full range of verbs found in inversions. Instead, inversion is subject to a pragmatic constraint to the effect that the verb must not represent new information in the discourse. In the case of be, the verb is inherently informationally light; the data in this study indicate that other verbs appearing in felicitous inversions are likewise informationally light in that they represent evoked or inferrable information in context and therefore contribute no new information to the discourse. Thus, all verbs appearing in central position in inversion can be characterized by a single discourse-based principle.

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