Speaker’s Involvement in Press Reportage: The Case of Nonlexicalised and Lexicalised Locative Inversion

Abstract

This article offers a corpus-based analysis of locative inversion in journalistic writing. The study focuses on the analysis of the construction in press reportage dealing with cultural, sports, financial, political and spot news in Present-Day English. On the basis of data retrieved from six different corpora, it is argued that the distribution of locative inversion in these texts is related to the degree of the writer’s involvement in each text style. Results show that the more involved a text is, the more locative inversions may be expected. The study further demonstrates that the construction itself serves as a discourse marker through which the presence of the writer is encoded in these texts.