earticle

영어

Many scholars have claimed that constituent ordering is dependent on either syntactic complexity or information status, but very few have made a comparison of the two factors. The purpose of this study is to show that both factors influence ordering. Specifically it shows that inversion in English can be regarded as being motivated by both relative syntactic weight and relative information status and that there is a correlation between them. The data used for this study are English inversion constructions found in ICE-GB. This study uses a word-counting metric to investigate syntactic weight, and a given-new pair to investigate information status. The results of this study confirm that, most tokens are post-heavy and post-new. The new elements tend to be complex, but the given ones tend to be simple. Inversion serves to maintain the relative information status, where the newer information is presented at the end of the sentence. Similarly, inversion serves to maintain the distribution of syntactic weight in which the heavier elements are delayed to the end of the sentence. This study concludes that both syntactic complexity and information status are equally influential in constituent ordering in English inversion constructions