Abstract:

Students whose major is English are not enthusiastic about studying linguistic disciplines due to the fact that bachelor-degree morphology and syntax courses are considered extremely difficult. Students are exposed to a lot of theoretical knowledge which is not sufficiently practised due to an insufficient number of seminars per week in two semesters. The introduction of extra courses referring to English grammar in a master-degree programme resulted from a limited use of more complex grammatical structures typical for contemporary English while writing essays or bachelor-degree theses.

Our study presents research in which the idea of introducing students to the use of inversion in contemporary English was based on the necessity to make them be aware of it despite the fact that it is relatively rare. They will be exposed to it in their future professional life as it is a main-clause phenomenon used in conversation, fiction, and news. At the beginning of this research, students were provided with theoretical insight into the use of inversion and practised different types of inversion in course book exercises, excluding syntactically conditioned inversion in interrogative clauses. After this training, they still considered this grammatical pattern more theoretical than practical and therefore it was necessary to enable them to discover this grammatical phenomenon in real use.

The article offers an analysis of data achieved by students who were expected to read the first part of the book comprising 285 pages taken from British contemporary literary prose. The students, working in four groups, were divided according to the phenomenon they were expected to focus on, for example, lexical or stylistic inversion, the use of inversion in formal or informal texts, etc. They were expected to find the occurrence of inversion in present-day English outside interrogative clauses, focusing on both two main types: full inversion and partial inversion.

The aim of the article is to thoroughly examine student’s findings, focusing on different classifications and analyse data both qualitatively and quantitatively to gain a full picture of the use of inversion in present-day English, especially in contemporary literary prose.

Keywords:

Inversion, full inversion, partial inversion, lexical and stylistic inversion, contemporary English.