Subject-Predicate inversion and its cognitive sources

摘要

In Russian, as well as in several other languages, fronting of a constituent that occupies the final position in a sentence is often accompanied by Subject-Predicate inversion: Word order in (1) and (2) should be examined relating to intonation, particularly in connection with the location and type of phrasal accents, i.e. in the context of ‘linear-accentual structures’ of the sentence. There are several types of transformations in Russian, which change the linear-accentual structure. One of them is ‘thematic preposition’, i.e. fronting of a constituent accompanied by a change of phrasal accent from a falling rhematic pitch to a raising thematic one, cf. (2). The analysis focuses on sentences consisting of theme and rheme, where we deal with a kind of compound rheme consisting of more than one word, i.e. verb and ‘rhematic centre’.