Thus, we could describe the verb tense morphology of the past progressive tense in English as consisting of the past tense form of the auxiliary verb frand the -rȣ added to the base form of the main verb. | 62 1 The Grammar Book On the other hand Gary does not feel that the fronting of negative or of degree or extent constituents accomplishes the same discourse function Never have I seen such a mess So absurd was his proposition that no one believed him. We agree with Gary and feel that these last two cases of fronting express an emphatic exclamatory meaning. Use of negative or degree extent comparison fronting reflects exclamatory speaker writer stance rather than signaling the possibility of surprise or counterexpectation on the part of the listener reader. Gary 1974 used fiction . paperback novels as his source for examples. Yang 1989 used a larger and more diversified database that included transcribed speech short stories academic writing and journalism. One interesting finding she made is that marked word order with inversion did not occur at all in her oral corpus about 24 500 words which had only one instance of direct object fronting John I like. In her written corpus about 70 000 words drawn from fiction journalism and academic writing Yang found 29 instances of inverted word order only five of which 17 percent expressed contrast or counter expectation. However she found 16 cases 55 percent where the marked word order with inversion served to maintain thematic continuity and eight cases 28 percent where it established or resumed a In the following example thematic continuity is maintained through use of marked word order and inversion A short LA Times article describes Mother Teresa s visit to South Africa. Having reported what Mother Teresa said upon arrival at the airport the writer continues Accompanying her Mother Teresa were four nuns who will run the new mission. Yang 1989 23 Here the present participle fronting and inversion serve to keep Mother Teresa as the initial noun phrase in the clause. The same goal could have been achieved of course by using passive voice a focus construction we have discussed previously in Chapter 18 . She was .
