Notes on Deictic Inversion and Quotative Inversion in English

The peculiar syntactic and semantic properties of locative inversion (LI) have been a central research topic in the generative framework. It is argued that LI has a semantic/cognitive function of expressing a directly perceived situation that is about to happen, is happening, or has happened before the speaker' s eyes (Fukuchi (1985) and Hasegawa (2010)). Unifying LI and Japanese thetic judgment sentences into the presentational clause type, Hasegawa (2010) proposes a cartographic analysis to account for their syntactic and semantic/cognitive properties. According to Hasegawa's analysis of LI, the preposed locative PP occupies [Spec, ForceP], thereby encoding the clause type as presentational. The aim of this paper is to develop Hasegawa’s analysis of LI by elaborating on the information-structural status of the locative PP. More specifically, I propose that the locative PP may target either [Spec, ModP] or [Spec, FocP]: In the former, the postverbal NP carries focus; in the latter, the preposed locative PP carries focus. Extending the proposed analysis to quotative inversion (QI), I further argue that the derivation of QI may involve focus fronting, concluding that LI (/Deictic Inversion) involving focus fronting is theoretically treated on par with QI. This study thus makes a theoretical contribution to the unified approach to LI and QI that has been motivated on different grounds in previous studies (e.g., Collins (1997) and Wu (2008)).