Most studies on English locative inversion are confined to the field of syntax with little consideration of the constraints from discourse or pragmatics.

English Inversion Revisited in the Cognitive Linguistics;

From figure-background theory read salient function of focus in English inverted sentences;

Trajector—landmark theory illustrates the thought that English inverted sentences are in accordance with the salient principles from the cognitive perspective.

The salient function of inverted sentences have been analyzed again from the perspective of the figure/ground theory in cognitive linguistics.

Previous research on inversion has been done at the syntactic level.

There exist differences between English and Chinese sentence structures as in the use of conjunctions in compound and complex sentences,in the omission of subjects,in inversion and in the relationship between members of the sentence and part of speech.

As a marked word order structure, inversion has its own special meaning.

English inversions, instead of being the variations of the seven “clause types", are termed in contrast to the canonical word order of “S-V-O" in the English language.

English inversion, as a grammatical form, is a very important part of contemporary linguistic study.

This thesis makes a tentative analysis of English inversion within the theoretical framework of prototype-model theory, with a view to exploring the relationship between inversion and its canonical counterpart, information focus distributed in inversion and the generative mechanism of inversion subtypes.