Information Structure and Inversion in English and Vietnamese: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

Word order encodes information structure in discourse, not only grammatical relations. In this paper, inversion in English and Vietnamese is studied in the perspective of information structure, considering the inversion as a communicative strategy for the distribution of given and new information, the construction of discourse frames, and the highlighting of focal content. The study examines four types of inversion including locative, directional, negative and presentational in terms of the notions of topic, focus and stage topic. The results show that, in both languages, fronted constituents function as stage topics, offering a discourse frame before new referents are introduced, while sentence-final position always encodes focal, discourse-new information. The two languages, however, differ widely in the grammatical manifestation of inversion. English inversion is syntactically restricted: verb class restrictions, mandatory auxiliary-subject inversion in negative constructions, and deictic marking in presentational structures. Vietnamese, which has no morphological inflection and no auxiliary inversion, depends on a discourse-oriented system of flexible constituent ordering. The stage-topic function in this system spans a continuum of constructions, including existential and copular structures, that does not conform to the discrete categorial boundaries maintained in English. This asymmetry is more basic than a difference in formal means: inversion is a syntactically licensed operation in English but a discourse-motivated positional strategy in Vietnamese.