INVERSION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE LITERATURE

Literature always plays an essential role in most people’s spirit life.  Though the explosion of information and the revolution of high technology, especially the internet,  for a few recent decades have given us various kinds of entertainments, literature still one of the oldest and most favorite ways of entertaining, learning and experiencing life. 

Besides, every literary works reflect authors’ talents, one of that is the way they use the language to express their ideas and to impress the readers. There are many ways the writers have been using to make the language become such a valuable and flexible means of transferring the ideas. Sometimes, a simple way of forming a sentence or a bit strange order of words can make the ideas become so impressive and unforgettable – inversion is one of those ways which creates great effects for literary works. 

Inversion is a special language feature. It is used to give emphasis or to be rhetorical in more formal situations, in political speeches, on news, in day-to-day conversations and especially in literature.

Inversion, as it may seem, is simply a reversal of what is considered the normal or usual order of the constituent parts. In fact, to English learners, it is not easy to understand and use inversion correctly. To apply this structure, writers not only have to master the normal grammatical structures of sentences but also the unusual or abnormal ones. Inversion is used a lot in English as well as Vietnamese literature, especially in poetry. Many writers prefer to use it as both a grammatical structure and literary device because it is able to make readers come to the same idea with new ways of approaching, so that things will seem to be new and more impressive. Moreover, in order to use inversion in their works, the authors must take into account the skill of using the language, how to organize and develop their writing. They must choose the right sentences and ideas to apply this stylistic device that it will promote the best effect, otherwise the sentences will be so tangled and difficult for the readers to understand what the authors want to reveal.

One strong motivation for my choice is the fact that the use of inversion in literature has a great appeal to most of readers. Right when readers look at a phrase or sentence in which there is a strange order of words (or a group of words), they will think that there must be something special about this point that the author wants them to notice. Therefore, inversion somehow immediately draws readers’ attention to the exact point that the writer emphasizes. Another interesting thing about inversion is that there are grammatical rules for reversing words for phrases, but many writers also create their own ways which often give stronger effect for being unexpected.

Inversion, a syntactical stylistic device, has a great expressive value. It has so far been an interesting topic for study all over the world. In fact, inversion has been dealt with by many famous linguists in both English and Vietnamese such as: Galperin [17], Wales [37], Cullicover and Levine [10], etc. These authors have made great contributions to the background theory of this research. 

Also, inversion has drawn the attention of some Vietnamese researchers. Nguyen Thi Quynh Hoa [26], for example, did a research on functions of English inversion structures. However, in this thesis she only studied the functions of inversion structures not the stylistic features and not in English and Vietnamese literature. 

Generally speaking, most of the studies in both English and Vietnamese are only investigations into the functions of inversion structures. It has not been explored and studied in depth in terms of syntactics and pragmatics. Up to now, there has not been a systematic and thorough investigation into the typical syntactic and pragmatic features of inversion in both English and Vietnamese, especially in poetry, which leaves room for me to do this research.