Author(s)

Yixuan He ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Foreign Languages, College of International Business and Economics, WTU, Wuhan, Hubei, China

Corresponding Author

Yixuan He

ABSTRACT

What is noticeable is that in English, there exist a variety of expressions to convey a given proposition. Why would the English language provide the speaker with so many syntactic options for saying what amounts to the same thing? Drawing lessons from previous studies, this research found that the main reason of the phenomenon is that multiple choices allow the speaker to mark the information status of different constituents that make up the sentence. By altering the world order of the proposition, the speaker could provide the hearer with an inference of which part of the information is given and which part is new, so that the hearer could understand and follow the speaker more easily. Among so many different syntactic ways of expressing a given proposition, non-canonical constructions have caught researchers’ eyes for years due to its function of increasing discourse coherence while communicating and its significance in meeting the immediate communication needs. Therefore, this paper specializes in three typical non-canonical utterances, locative inversion, there insertion and left dislocation, with instances selected from a series of fairy tales to further explore how they achieve coherent function and help the hearer or the reader follow the story easily.

KEYWORDS

Non-canonical word order, Fairy tales, Locative Inversion, Existential there, Presentational there, Left Dislocation

CITE THIS PAPER

Yixuan He, Non-canonical Word Order and Its Discourse Functions in English Fairy Tales. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2023) Vol. 6: 14-17. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2023.060603.

REFERENCES

[1] Betty J. Birner. (2004) Discourse Functions at the Periphery: Non-canonical Word Order in English. Northern Illinois University, 2, 41-61. 
[2] Ellen F. Prince. (1992) The ZPG Letter: Subjects, Definiteness, and Information-Status. Discourse Description: Diverse Analyses ofa Fundraising Text. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 3, 295-325.
[3] Ellen F. Prince. (1997) On the Functions of Left-Dislocation in English Discourse. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 117-145.
[4] E. Vallduvé & Elisabet Engdahl. (1996) The Linguistic Realisation of Information Packaging. Linguistics, 34, 459-519. 
[5] Gregory Ward & Betty Birner. (1996) On the Discourse Function of Rightward Movement in English. Center for the study of language and information, 12, 463-479. 
[6] Hans Broekhuis. (2005) Locative inversion in English. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 5, 49–60.
[7] Levin Beth. (1993) English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Computational Linguistics, 20, 495-497.

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