Subject-auxiliary inversion in academic prose

• Autores: Carlos Prado Alonso
• Localización: Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos ( AELFE ), ISSN-e 2340-2784, ISSN 1139-7241, Nº. 42, 2021, págs. 59-84
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.17398/2340-2784.42.59
• Títulos paralelos:
  • Lainversióndesujetoyauxiliarentextosacadémicos
• Enlaces
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• Resumen
  • español

    Este artículo examina la inversión de sujeto y auxiliar en textos de prosa académica inglesa mediante un análisis de corpus lingüísticos. El análisis toma como punto de partida la construcción x Auxiliar Sujeto, tratada en Chen (2013), donde la x representa un constituyente topicalizado que provoca la inversión del auxiliar y del sujeto como, por ejemplo, en las siguientes oraciones: Little did she understand what was being dealt with / What does that mean? En el artículo se argumenta que, en la prosa académica del inglés, la distribución de la inversión de sujeto y auxiliar está relacionada con el grado de implicación del emisor en los textos. El estudio demuestra que cuanto mayor sea el grado de presencia del autor en el texto, más uso de inversiones de sujeto y auxiliar cabe esperar. El análisis de corpus también demuestra que la inversión de sujeto y auxiliar es mucho más frecuente en la prosa académica de las ciencias humanas y sociales que en la de las ciencias exactas, y también pone de manifiesto que la construcción se puede utilizar como marcador del discurso que permite la presencia del emisor en este tipo de prosa

  • English

    This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of subject-auxiliary inversion in academic prose texts. 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 Little did she understand what was being dealt with or What does that mean? It is argued that the distribution of subject-auxiliary inversion in academic prose is related to the degree of an addressor’s involvement in the texts. It will be shown that the more involvement in an academic prose text, the more inversions are to be expected. Furthermore, the data will show that subject-auxiliary inversion is far more frequently attested in learned exposition academic prose texts than in scientific exposition academic prose texts, and that the construction itself can be seen to serve as a discourse marker through which an addressor’s involvement is coded in academic writing

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