Subject-operator inversion after sentence-initial only seen through its Czech equivalents

Abstract

Michaela Martinkova: SUBJECT-OPERATOR INVERSION AFTER SENTENCE-INITIAL ONLY SEEN THROUGH ITS CZECH EQUIVALENTS The paper presents the results of a systematic analysis of English sentences with subjectoperator inversion after sentence-initial only through their Czech equivalents in a parallel translation corpus of English and Czech (InterCorp). Though the number of relevant tokens found in a parallel translation corpus is inevitably low and the Czech equivalents can hardly account for all tokens of the absence of S-O inversion after sentence-initial only focusing fronted adverbials, they nonetheless bring interesting evidence about the function of only in these sentences and about the scope of only as a restrictive focusing modifier. The contrastive analysis also sheds new light on two Czech temporal particles teprve [not until] and jestě [still] and opens areas for future research on monolingual corpora of both English and Czech.