230 María de los Ángeles Gómez-González
found in that location. Thus, the camera angle of the scene shifts to my
packet of biscuits, which is also focal, thereby establishing the postverbal
Subject as a prominent participant that is introduced in discourse in order
to, in this particular case, close a story about biscuits (the global D-Topic:
a stranger eats the narrator’s biscuits), exploiting the recency effect, or
prominence of last mention. Alternatively, (1b) lacks the presentative ef-
fect and simply profiles a spatial relationship attributing a location to my
biscuits (a local D-Topic), again by means of a zooming-in strategy
whereby the focus of attention shifts from a more generic to a more spe-
cific location.^17
The presentative strategy recurs in (2b) – also a spatial Subject-verb in-
version – and in (2a), although in the latter case it is implemented
differently through the thematization of existential there. In the first incre-
ment of (2a) the Theme zone profiles an abstract setting, a presentational
frame through which the Subject (the three of us), speaker-empathic
through personal reference, receives focal prominence and exploits the re-
cency effect to become the target of attention over the successive
attentional frames, thereby becoming the D-Topic of the subsequent dis-
course spans. First it is assigned a location (in the car), then a state of mind
(all rather nervous), and finally attention zooms in on one of its members
(the third reporter), through reference chains coding Given information, as
shown in (10) below, an expanded version of (2a). (2c) and (2d) lack this
presentative potential – as was the case with (1b): a reference point (the
three of us) (the local D-Topic) is first assigned a spatial grounding and
then a mental grounding in (2c), and vice versa in (2d).
(10) ⏐ there were \three of us in the \car ⏐ \all °rather \nervous ⏐ the ∨third
re‘porter ⏐ was with the —Washington \Post ⏐ a /war corre‘spondent ⏐ for
\twenty ∨years ⏐ who'd \covered ‘Viet\nam ⏐ the —Washington ∨Post ‘man
‘said ⏐ he ∨hoped ⏐ that ∧ at an —army ∨checkpoint ⏐ just \before the ‘final
\stretch ⏐ to ‘Suchi\toto ⏐ they would \stop us from ‘going \through ⏐^
(LIBMSECAPT04: 018ff.)
To summarize, it can be argued that in contrast to the canonical varie-
ties, inversions, like preposings or left detachments, display a leftward
movement within the clause which has a substantial effect, whereas a dif-
ferent effect arises from the rightward movement entailed by existential-
there constructions, or right detachments and extrapositions. Inversions
normally act as instructions to place active, particularly inferrable, ele-
ments clause-initially, which in English are exempt from Subject status and