The Role of Inversion and PP-Fronting in Relating Discourse Elements: some implications for cognitive and computational models of Natural Language Processing

O. Abstract 1 This paper will explore and discuss the less obvious ways syntactic structure is used to convey information and how this information could be used by a natural language database system as a heuristic to organize and search a discourse space. The primary concern of this paper will be to present a general theory of processing which capitalizes on the information provided by such non-SVO word orders as inversion, (wh) clcfting and prepositional phrase (PP) fronting. since it seems that these non-SVO structures are sensitive to NPs. Thus every discourse representation is in some way redundantly specified for at least one constituent. For example, the organization of the discourse representation for the sentences, "In the forest stood a house" and "In the park, Mary kissed John", are: Labcl: house, forest D.R. : a house stood in the forest and 1. Introduction English at its simplest is an SVO, Subject Verb Object, language. However it is not limited to SVO order. Clefts, pseudo-clefts, inversion, topicalization, left dislocation and various types of fronting are instances of deviation from SVO order. Non-SVO orders are not exceptional or found only in obscure literary writing. They abound throughout writing and speech. An interesting question is what use do these structures do in English, and how can a cognitive or computational theory use such information?