ABSTRACT
The English language provides its speakers with a variety of noncanonical syntactic means for expressing a given proposition. Although these non-canonical-word-order utterances may be truth-conditionally equivalent to the corresponding canonical variants, they differ in their relationship to the discourse context. This chapter focuses on three classes of noncanonical constructions that exploit peripheral sentence position to preserve discourse coherence, and shows how this coherence is attained via inferential links between the current utterance and the prior discourse. 2
