English Conditional Inversion: A Construction-Based Approach

Conditional sentences also can be formed by inversion of subject and auxiliary, but it happens only in a limited environment. This paper addresses grammatical constraints in conditional inversion and how they behave differently from the regular conditional clauses based on corpus investigations. Our corpus search reveals many different types of conditional inversion constructions, indicating the difficulties of deriving inverted conditionals from movement operations. In this paper, we provide a construction-based approach to the inverted conditional construction. The paper shows that the most optimal way of describing the general as well as idiosyncratic properties of the inverted conditional constructions is an account in the spirit of construction grammar in which a grammar is a repertory of constructions forming a network connected by links of inheritance.