Foregrounding of the principal parts of the sentence by means of stylistic inversion in Russian, Chuvash and English: A comparative analysis

Abstract

The study aims to identify the ways of foregrounding the principal parts of the sentence (the subject and the predicate) by means of stylistic inversion in differently structured languages. The scientific novelty of the study lies in examining in a comparative manner the nation-specific techniques of the structural organisation of the expressive syntactic construction the purpose of which is to foreground the subject or the predicate. The paper describes the rules for constructing a stylistically neutral declarative sentence in each language under consideration, which directly affect the functioning of inversion. The work shows that in Chuvash and English, unlike Russian, the foregrounding of one sentence part can occur due to the inversion of another. Examples of the structural and grammatical organisation of inverted sentences in each language are given. As a result, it was determined that the stricter the word order in a sentence is, the more additional ways of having expressive influence on the addressee by means of stylistic inversion there are in a language. The ways of constructing inverted phrases specific to the Russian, Chuvash and English languages in order to foreground the principal parts of the sentence (the subject and the predicate) were identified.