Abstract: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) X Auxiliary Subject construction (XASC), where X codes the fronting of a constituent which triggers the inversion of the auxiliary and the subject, as in “Never has trade union loyalty faced a more baffling test” or “What did he do?” On the basis of a statistical analysis using corpora of written and spoken English, it is argued that the distribution of XAS … Show more
Set email alert for when this publication receives citations?
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.