Inversion in Modern Written English

This book discusses full-verb inversions in modern academic and narrative writing. The analysis focuses on the use of this construction for text structuring and aesthetic purposes on the one and on the influence of syntactic complexity and information status on the other hand. It is shown that the distribution of syntactic complexity and information status in inverted constructions is a consequence of the fully conscious and deliberate exploitation of inversions on the part of the writer. In addition, the book describes a new and innovative method of scanning unparsed corpora for rare syntactic constructions.