Inversion or Operator Fronting? How to Teach Grammar more Effectively?

The paper aims at offering a possible way to throw a bridge between modern syntactic theory and the teaching of grammar in the English classroom to intermediate and advanced adult students. It reveals how the widely used term inversion in the English descriptive and pedagogical grammars, as well as in most of the teaching materials, causes false overgeneralizations and clashes with common linguistic sense. The analysis focuses on language data including the direct general and special questions in the English interrogatives containing a simple and a complex predicate. Special attention is paid to the so called “reversive inversion” in reported questions and to the so called “negative inversion”. It is suggested that the explanation in the classroom should be provided by introducing the term “operator fronting” instead of “inversion”. The whole description follows Ockham’s Razor methodological principle of economy to reach the effect of using minimal means of description to cover the most possible language facts.