Inversion (linguistics)

In linguistics, grammatical inversion is any of a number of different distinct grammatical constructions in the languages of the world. There are three main uses in the literature which, unfortunately, have little if any overlap either formally or typologically: syntactic inversion, thematic inversion, and feature inversion.

=Syntactic inversion=

The first and most widely noted kind of inversion occurs in the constructions of Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Otjiherero, Chichewa, and a number of Germanic and Bantu languages in which a noun or adpositional phrase is shifted from its default postverbal position to one before the main verb of the clause. In the English language, such syntactic inversion typically comes in two varieties: locative inversion and nonlocative inversion. For example:
*Locative inversion: "A lamp was in the corner" to "In the corner was a lamp"
*Nonlocative inversion: "The growing number of TB cases is especially worrisome to public health experts" to "Especially worrisome to public health experts is the growing number of TB-cases" (nonlocative inversion).

Syntactic inversion has played an important role in the history of linguistic theory because of the way it interacts with question formation and topic and focus constructions. In languages with verb-second phenomena, such as German, inversion can function as a test for syntactic constituency, since precisely one constituent may surface preverbally: "Ein Jahr nach dem Autounfall sieht er wirklich gut aus" [lit. 'A year after the car wreck, looks he really good'] .

Thematic inversion

The second kind of inversion occurs when the grammatical subject is not also the thematic agent of the clause. This typically takes the form of verbal arguments that are semantically experiencers but which are marked with an oblique case, but they may or may not have subject properties like the control of reflexives or triggering agreement on the verb. For example, in German and Russian, for verbs meaning to "please", the experiencer is usually fronted to topic position in the sentence: "Mir gefällt es", "Mne nravitsya", both "I like it". In both cases, the experiencer cannot be the antecedent for the reflexive: "He likes himself" cannot be *"Ihm gefällt sich" or *"Yemu nravitsya sebya". In Georgian, on the other hand, the experiencer agrees with the object on the verb, but can control reflexivization: "Me momts'ons čemi tavi".

Feature inversion

The third and rarest kind of inversion involves constructions which are sensitive to feature hierarchies. In Algonquian languages in an agreement context, for example, verbs agree with both subject and object: "ne-wāpam-ā-w-a" 1-look.at-DIR-3-3Sg 'I looked at him'. However, the person markers do not indicate subject and object status; rather, the set of morphemes called direct or inverse markers do that. When a third person acts on a first person, the person markers remain the same, but the direct marker switches to an inverse marker: "ne-wāpam-ekw-w-a" 1-look.at-INV-3-3Sg 'He looked at me'.