第八讲后置前置倒装剖析.ppt

* Postponement, Fronting and Inversion Lecture VIII Sentence Structure SV SVO SVC SVOiOd SVOC SVAd There be The natural order? Subject+predicate Word Order Modern English has a more or less fixed word order in sentence construction. According to its normal, or natural, order, the subject usually comes first and the predicate follows the subject. Apart from the adverbial which is mobile, the positions of the other four clause elements—subject, predicator, object, and complement—are almost fixed, that is, the subject precedes the predicator which is followed by the object or the complement, if any. End focus and End weight The sentence as an information unit, consists of two parts: old information + new information. Old information (also called given / known information) is the kind of information which, the speaker assumes, is already known to the hearer, and this is usually expressed by the subject. New information, usually expressed by the predicate, is the message to be conveyed, and the focus or the most important part of the message usually occupies the end position in the sentence. That is what we call information focus or end focus. Closely related to the principle of end focus is that of end weight, which manifests itself in the fact that the construction of the subject is usually shorter and less complicated than that of the predicate where the new information lies. According to the principle of end weight, sentences are generally constructed in such a way as to avoid being top-heavy or awkwardly unbalanced. Postponement Postponement means delaying the appearance of a grammatical unit until a later time. The end position in a sentence is normally reserved for Highlighting key words. Hence, postponement becomes A grammatical device for achieving emphasis. What did he give you? Who did he give a book? A book. He gave me a book. Me. He gave a book to me. In ditransitive complementation, there are two possible orderings: the indirect