问答题
A story by Robert Louis Stevenson contains the sentence “As the night fell, the wind rose.” Could this be expressed as “As the wind rose, the night fell”? If not, why? Does this indicate a non-arbitrariness about word order?无
【正确答案】No. These two parts can not interchange. Yes, it is a case in point to illustrate non-arbitrariness about word order. When the two parts interchange, the focus and the meaning of the sentence is forced to change, because clause occurring in linear sequence without time indicators will be taking as matching the actual sequence of happening. The writer’s original intention is distorted, and we can feel it effortlessly by reading. That is why systemic-functionalists and American functionalists think language is not arbitrary at the syntactic level.