A New Look at Negative and Correlative Subject-Auxiliary Inversion in English

摘要

In current grammars and handbooks of English, negatively conditioned inversion is usually taken for granted as a fact of the language and no attempt is made to explain why, for example, a sentence-initial never should have an inverting force that is lacking in always or why correlative not only is regularly followed by inversion in spite of the fact that it does not negate the content of the clause it introduces. Opinions differ about the frequency of inversion after the various initial elements and also about the range of factors determining this deviation from the normal order. The present study, an updated and revised version of Jacobsson 1986, is mainly based on material covering the last twenty-five years. Among previous accounts of negative inversion mention should be made of Hartvigson and Kvistgaard Jakobsen 1974, Schmidt 1980, Erdmann 1979, 1988, and Knig 1988. Georgia Green, in 'Some wherefores of English inversions' (1980), catalogues and discusses a number of inversion structures which have in common the emphaticness of the preposed phrase. But, she notes, we cannot invert any statement to make it emphatic and we do not find, for example, *Certainly can phrase-structure rules describe such relations. She concludes, on a pessimistic note, that “the possibility of a unified functional explanation is unlikely at best.” In 'Colloquial and literary uses of inversions' (1982:121f.) Green observes that previous research in this area has been “historically oriented and/or primarily taxonomic” and that in some of these “function-based taxonomies” all or most of the examples are drawn from cited texts. Liliane Haegeman (1995), who represents a late, if not the latest, version of generative grammar, offers a new terminology rather than new insights. She invokes a so-called NEG-criterion to explain inversion in, for example, On no account will I do that, such sentences being “negative sentences in an intuitive sense. They can be coordinated with neither-tags and they do not take so-tags” (p. 181). The movement of the auxiliary will is triggered by the NEG-criterion, on no account being a negative operator which “needs to attain a spec-head relation with a negative head” (p. 272). Following Rudanko (1982:356), Haegeman lists clear cases of 'non-operators', such as not long ago, and of 'operators', such as not often. For further discussion of NEG-operators and the specifier-head relation, see also Haegeman 2000:121-160, and for discussion in terms of Chomsky's Minimalist Program, also Radford 2004 passim. Heidrun Dorgeloh, finally, whose 1997 monograph has been hailed as a major contribution to the field, notes (p. 40) that some earlier work on inversion “is of a more descriptive or taxonomic kind” and that SAI (subject-auxiliary inversion) “due to its mostly obligatory status” is “treated as an attraction inversion, i.e. an automatised construction (Hartvigson/Jakobsen 1974)”. In what follows special attention will be paid to the main factors conducive to negative inversion and to the telltale borderline cases where both orders are possible but may differ in frequency or acceptability. A case in point is initial no way, which, if discussed at all, is generally supposed to take obligatory inversion. The reality is different and the full story remains to be told.