영어 주어-동사 도치 구문 유발요인에 대한 코퍼스 기반 연구

A Corpus-based Study on the Causes of English Subject-Verb Inversion

The purpose of this study is to investigate the causes of English Subject-Verb Inversion(SVI) based on a personally built corpus. This study also examines the characteristics of the verbs used in SVI. The corpus amounts to approximately 600,000 words of English in total. The findings of the study are as follows. First, this study revealed that both syntactic complexity and information status influence word order in English, in that most cases of SVI in the corpus were post-heavy and post-new, which means that an element of heavy weight and new information tends to be located toward the end of a sentence. Therefore, this study proves that SVI is in correlation with syntactic complexity and information status. It also identified that most of the verbs found in the SVI construction were be and intransitive verbs. In other words, the verbs used in the SVI construction are informationally light without representing new information. However, given that the corpus size of this study is small compared to other corpus-driven studies, future research requires increasing the data size of the corpus. Moreover, this study only focuses on written texts, so it is necessary to include spoken texts for a comparative analysis of written and spoken texts.