A comprehensive corpus-based analysis of “X Auxiliary Subject” constructions in written and spoken English

• Published in: Topics in linguistics Vol. 20; no. 2; pp. 17 - 32
• Main Author: Prado-Alonso, Carlos
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin Sciendo 01.12.2019; De Gruyter Poland; Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra
• Subjects: Clauses; corpus; Corpus analysis; Declarative sentences; Discourse analysis; Discourse markers; Emotions; English language; English word order; Labor unions; Linguistics; Semantics; speech; Statistical analysis; subject-auxiliary inversion; Syntactic structures; textual variation; Word order; writing; XAS constructions

This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of subject-auxiliary inversion in both spoken and written English. The focus of the analysis is Chen’s (2013) construction (XASC), where X codes the fronting of a constituent which triggers the inversion of the auxiliary and the subject, as in “Never has...