ANOTHER LOOK AT NEGATIVELY CONDITIONED SUBJECT‐OPERATOR INVERSION IN ENGLISH 1

Summary The regularization of subject ‐ operator inversion as used after negatives, restrictives, and certain correlatives is a process that has been going on for centuries and may still be going on, for all we know. It started with full negatives like neither and was then extended to near‐negatives, restrictives, and correlatives (including so + adjective/adverb. that ). Various attempts have been made to find the rationale underlying this process, but none of the concepts proposed so far can be raised to the status of an all‐embracing explanatory principle. Emphaticness is obviously one of the factors involved, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the use of inversion. Affect ‐attraction, as defined by Klima, is broad enough to accommodate both interrogative and negative inversion but too narrow to account for inversion with so . Negative attraction, also invoked by Klima and by others before and after him, is a more likely candidate, but it has to be defined and explained in its turn. The conclusion arrived at in the present study is that negative inversion serves a twofold purpose: syntactically, it brings about a closer connection between negative and verb (negative attraction or, more generally, connectedness); semantically, it has the effect of making the clause non‐affirmative, thus eliminating the undesirable sequence negative opener + affirmative S‐V. In borderline cases, such as sentences with preposed not without reason or not for nothing , it is usually the syntactic principle that prevails, i. e. inversion is used in spite of the fact that the sentence is affirmative in meaning. The syntactic principle also accounts for the regular use of inversion after preposed correlatives, whether near‐negative like hardly or non‐negative like so .