Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

An initial description of the links between cognitive input, discourse rules, and the rules of sentence grammar is made, based on a technique developed for observing the translation of cognitive input into language in a spontaneous, practical speech event: descriptions of the lay-outs of apartments. (Author/RM)