Non-canonical inversions in english

There is something that's been bugging me guys quite a bit recently and I thought I would direct my questions to all of those educated linguistic experts and english fiends on this forum. And since it is the "english only "section I think I'm in the right place with my doubts.

While I perfectly understand ( at least I think I do) the usage of the invervions with negative adverbials as in "Not only is he as thick as two short planks squirt but he is also ...."( I hope the preposed doesn't apply to me, haha) I can't comprehend somehow the purpose of the inversion as in " Outside stood a little angel" where we violate by all means the famous canonical SVO word order.
Again, I realise of course that the purpose of the inversions in general is to put an additional emphasis and create dramatic effect in a sentence and yadda yadda yadda ...and that it is mainly used in books and literary works and drivel like.. but as in our " outside stood a liitle dwarf" or whatever the hell it stood there, I can't comprehend somehow what purpose it is served there by the preposing of typical adverbial with postposing and inversion of the subject.

When we invert it back we have our familiar SVO based 'A little dwarf stood outside" which said structure I'm more comfortable with personally.

So, following this "inversion" thread further forward in its abstruse convolution and violating our basic SVO order to a bit greater extent, may be it would be "politiacally correct"( in sense of grammar of course) to say - Stood a little angel outside " or " "A little otuside stood angel" or " Stood outside an angel little" ?? Because it just fits our rhyme ????

My point is basically this : Why the hell does what goes before go before ? and Why the heck does what comes after come after?

I was googling for some answers to this and the only point I found was like this :
"they"( who?? doyen grammarinas form Cambridge in the 15th century ???)
allowed speakers to avoid marked intonations without sacrificing intended emphasis". Again, I get the point that a non-canonical inverted sentence, so to speak, takes on a different intonation peak but I'm stll a bit vague about it as a whole!!!!!

So chums and gals , would someone be so kind and elucidate it to my limited brain in a bit more down-to-earth terms ? With some examples may be?? I'm sure some of you must've been confronted the stuff like this in your translations.

I mean whenever someone on this forum asks for help to correct his or her stupid
blunders you all eagerly rush into it, so please help me out too.

it's all canonical
this kind of inversion is possible with verbs of position and motion accompanied by adverbials of place
near the castle was/stood/grew a tree
In came a drunken soldier
the word order is as follows: adverbial of place/direction + verb of position/motion + subject

Now let me enlighten you as to the existence of yet another type of inversion in English:
Growing/Standing near the castle was a tree. = A tree stood/grew near the castle
Note the apparent Past Continuous in the sentences with inversion
Note the word order - it's not *"near the castle was standing a tree"

Lastly, note that in all the examples above ("yours" and "mine", the subject, which comes last, has an indefinite article preceding it. Thus, it is new information (the rheme) in the sentence; hence, it is quite natural to try to place it near the end of thesentence, which thes ekinds of inversion allow you to do.

For more info, look up 'full verb inversion' in good grammar books.

thanks mg, yeah it is a bit of help to me but I still need to "process" it as I ma not so quick on the uptake as others may be..
While I seem to understand it "verbially" I have now to approach to it from theoretical side.

It's extremely interesting , I liked this especially " Growing/Standing near the castle was.

Thanks again

Here's one more of (nearly) the same kind
Enclosed with the letter was a small gift

I had to restart my computer don't know couldn't log ..
I thought it is non-canonical though ...but I ma not an expert of course.

but back to "" growing near the castle was a tree " , I'm more comfortable to take the " growing " just as a participle and then it goes place adverbial followed by the verb and subject , but I think I am talking through my hat now because I don't apparently have an idea what I am taking about..

Anyway I appreciate your answer mg and I am certainly "absorbing" it with all my heart.

BTW heard the news about how Figurski was exusing himself why he used a word "retarded" referring to our NUMBER ONE , interesting , they should employ me I am not

wanted to say I am not afraid of being nicked for such a thing.
People in our country DON'T HAVE A CLUE what kind of epithets they operate there in the US , especially on the us conservative radio.Their hairs would've stood son end if they heard for ex " this fradulent sychopathic liberal schmuck should clean the toilets of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

I'm listening to it right now and even worse... and nobody NOBODY would come up with the idea to prosecute radio talk hosts .banana republic

.. again I had to restart my vaio twice, what is going on??. i cant log. May be "these pint-sized minions" are trying to locate me, who knows..

Thank God we dont live in the US, i mean if we lived in the US with our current president being the president there this forum would've surely been spied and bugged in all possible ways that the US secret service have power with and they've most likely would knocked my door tomorrow to lock me up in a cave with sticks and berries so I could only be able to scratch truth pictograms on the walls..

For those who dont know it yet, this country is run by stinking, mendasious,avaricious,insidious crooks who feed us quotidially

I know you're all asleep ..because you all have to go about your daily lives tomorrow (i dont) but without understanding almost nothing about the world around you and I've come to the conclusion that it is probably the most effective way to live our life.
It's easier not to think about it but just do things. As I mentioned once in my earlier posts : getting things done is praised-contemplation derided and this is ok it seems to me now, I know i'm rambling on ...

Applying the past progressive scheme to MY inversion now, mg correct me if i'm wrong( you won't find it in any handbook I bet) :

Having in the hospital had surgically removed their two brain cells before entering civil service twin boys couldn't realise all the complexity of the situation at he time. Alleviated the boredoom playing with his empty testicles,sprawinlg in his bench in the house of Parlament was one of them while strutting along pluckily and drawing a solace from his own stuperfaction was another one ......

How do you find it ? Please correct..

I'm writing to myself and this is not a political forum after all..

That's an interesting thing, reading through just one story I've found 2 sentences built like that:

On top of her light brown hair was a simple hair clip adorned with a white flower.
Appearing next to him was another man with the same scout attire that attack me.

The thing is that I don't really get it why any emphasis is needed in those sentences.

>because you all have to go about your daily
>lives tomorrow (i dont) but without understanding almost nothing about
>the world around you and I've come to the conclusion that it is
>probably the most effective way to live our life.

Ooh, your post reminded me of a question I've had for a long time, just forgot to ask; so if any of you would be so kind to explain ;p :
"without understanding almost nothing". I don't get why there is "nothing". My teacher told me it's cuz "without" is not a negative form, but doesn't it stand for "with no"? ;| Just wondering..

>The thing is that I don't really get it why any emphasis is needed in those sentences.

it's literature. you said that you found them in a story. story is the key wordhere. literature.

without understanding... anything - is what i would say

g I think I found a very good book by Rong Chen titled English Inversion: A Ground-before-figure Construction.
Thank God we have the internet. At the push of the button "EVERYTHING" we can get for free .

Have you ever heard by any chance of this book? Worth reading ? Stupid question i know , of course it's worth reading.. reading is always worth

In preface:

"The book provides an account of English inversion, a construction that displays perplexing idiosyncrasies at the level of semantics, phonology, syntax, and pragmatics. Basing his central argument on the claim that inversion is a linguistic representation of a Ground-before-Figure model, the author develops an elegant solution to a hitherto unsolved multidimensional linguistic puzzle and, in the process, supports the theoretical position that a cognitive approach best suits the multidimensionality of language itself. Engagingly written, the book will appeal to linguists of all persuasions and to any reader curious about the relationship between language and cognition."

Seems interesting what ?

I've just started to read it, just with an approach as if I was reading an interesting novel or fiction ...

The author goes through full verb inversions pretty well, in my book.
There are many interesting pecuiliarities of inversions that attract a such immature linguistically mind of mine.

I found this quite peculiar for me: "So he was sitting there, telling this bartender how heartbreaking it was to be a manager of circus clown, when up pops this Pear du Monville out of nowheres|".
be
or this : In the room are three woman and two men". What the inversion is this supposed to be ? Nobody uses it in our daily talk, don't they?

or "On the stairs had been left a pair of shoes by Mary", Common..give me a break.

What ev er I am delving into this now..

I was to go like : we go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing about.. bur I digged a bit.

So what I've learned from this "fiction book" as for now is that qoute "inversion doesn't allow the negation of its verb"unquote , rephrasing the author's words here - we don't use the verb in their negative form in inversion so we cannot probably say :On my left WAS NOT Tom Lopez, but On my left WAS Tom Lopez.

Do I get it right mg ?

Another thing they say that " simple-tense transitive verbs cannot occur in inversion ( except for its partipicial form)" So again we cannot say "Through the revolving door pushed Tom Lopes Marry Davis" since "push" here is intransitive ..
So can we say then "Through the revolving door thrust Tom Lopes Marry Davis" ??
employing "thrust" here intransitively ??

I just want to make it clear to myself mg, am i reasoning it out correctly ??

Then the guy rambles on " embbeded inversions"( vied as ungramatical by earlier works , he says)as in" I don't belive the report that in the garden stands a unicorn"

The fourth point of inversions he puts forward is whether the inverted verb can take complex auxiliaries like in : "on my left has been Tom" or on my left has been placed a doll-like unicorn"

Then he goes at lenght about all the pecuilarities and deviations of inversion to the extent that makes me gut-wrenching, well it's really interesting as the study but I feel as if I am slowly emerging myself into the deepest recesses of linguistic perplexity of the highest order.

As for me , I can comapare the reading this book woth a game of chess. It compels my "gray matter" to move a bit faster than it does( to be honest i'm not happy with its "moving" recently) .. well enough I gotta talk and talk and talk now ..

but last question since I don't have to pay for it..

Do we need these inversions at all? I mean of course we have to be acquainted with them by virtue of being learners of english but.. I am so tired ..

TW talking double negatives , I used the phrase in my earlier post which went like "without understanding almost nothing about..." which of course is gramatically incorrect( and it's not without reason that mg indeed implied it)

I've read somewhere about using double negatives that such expressions are often perceived as being grammatically incorrect and so on ...but mainly because of the ‘double negative’ construction, on the grounds that two negatives cancel each other out, making a positive. Everybody heard probably the famous" You ain't heard nothing folks"(quotation from Al Jolson, from the first talking film The Jazz Singer,1927)
Supporters of this line of argument would make the logical point that if you ain’t heard nothing, then you must have heard something.

But have you ever heard ( I personally haven't before I've read about it) that during the Middle Ages double negatives were commonplace, and it was not unusual to find TRIPLE negatives used for emphasis. Triple !!! can you imagine that ? Chaucer ( english poet , the author of "the Canterbury Tales" lived in the 15th century I belive) used "no" "never" and "not" all together in ONE SENTENCE stressing some polite aspects of the Knight, it went something like: like " He never yet no villainly not said" that is 'he didn't speak with villainy' which originally was "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde" ( I hope I got it right).

So double negatives died out completely because of "mathematical grammar rules" and have become stigmatized under the influence of streamling a language which is quite understandable given that the more advanced we become the closer we are to the simplification of literally everything.
But it's good to know at least that double negatives were wdely used in the past.

>I found this quite peculiar for me: "So he was sitting there, telling
>this bartender how heartbreaking it was to be a manager of circus
>clown, when up pops this Pear du Monville out of nowheres|".

Nothing special. adverbial of place (up) + verbs of motion (pops = appears) + subject


>or this : In the room are three woman and two men". What the inversion
>is this supposed to be ?

>Nobody uses it in our daily talk, don't they?

right, btw the tag should be 'do they'

we cannot probably say :On my left WAS NOT Tom Lopez, but On my left WAS Tom Lopez.
>
>Do I get it right mg ?

Yeah

>
>Another thing they say that " simple-tense transitive verbs cannot
>occur in inversion ( except for its partipicial form)" So again we
>cannot say "Through the revolving door pushed Tom Lopes Marry Davis"
>since "push" here is intransitive ..
>So can we say then "Through the revolving door thrust Tom Lopes Marry
>Davis" ??
>employing "thrust" here intransitively ??

both verbs are transitive and so both sentences are incorrect

good good good thank you

found this quite peculiar for me: "So he was sitting there, telling
>this bartender how heartbreaking it was to be a manager of circus
>clown, when up pops this Pear du Monville out of nowheres|".

Nothing special. adverbial of place (up) + verbs of motion (pops = appears) + subject


>or this : In the room are three woman and two men". What the inversion
>is this supposed to be ?

>Nobody uses it in our daily talk, don't they?

right, btw the tag should be 'do they'

I missed this post somehow..
Yes for you it's nothing special of course because you are an expert who probably spent years going through such things and stuff with a fine-toothed comb but for me it sounds a bit jarring because I am only a learner and my learning curve has been running quite haphazardly but I'm trying systematize it.

Of course the tag should be'do they',negatie statment takes the positive tag and the other way round ,I shoud've remembered that,stupid blunders there happens to me to make(is my inversion here correct?)

It's good to have you here on this

>Yes for you it's nothing special of course because you are an expert
>who probably spent years going through such things and stuff with a
>fine-toothed comb but for me it sounds a bit jarring because I am only
>a learner and my learning curve has been running quite haphazardly but
>I'm trying systematize it.

Well, given your extensive vocabulary you're making great use of, it's surprising you should not have come across such constructions. Do you happen to live in an English-speaking country?

>Yes for you it's nothing special of course

my point was that it was not in any way more peculiar than the other examples of full verb inversion.

I thought you are all asleep ...Not that I've never heard of them, of course I ran across couple of them when reading.. but you have to admit that inversions are not such things that are commonly used except for literary works,moreover I listen to the radio( every single day at least ten hours and not because I have to but because I love it, I don't work because I'm a pensioner so I can devote as much time as I want) and belive me nobody ( I listen to Fox News,London Biggest Conversation,various talk shows mainly from the US) uses inversions, well sporadically it happens of course but anyway it seems to me that native speakers are somehow reluctant to use them.

I've got a couple of friends in the US,they are all born and bred americans not of those illegal aliens who can barely rig up a sentencelet let alone any literacy.. and I've been to the UK may be twice I think, my son has been working in the U.K for three years, these are the only my connections with english-speaking countries..but I happen to live in Russia for 15 years but this is another story.. .

I don't really think that my vocabulary is such extensive as you said,I'm trying to write and speak in the way I hear it and I know of course it leaves much to be desired.I'm a musician by profession,I used to be a professional piano player for 10 years.
The point i'm trying to make here that many adult learners of foreign languages don't undersatnd it somehow that the only thing they have to do is to copy IDENTICALLY and assimilate all those rudimentary phonetic characteristics which are itrinsic to the speech of a given language. I said phonetic , not grammar, because I think this is the bottom line here,grammar should come later, it's not an easy thing to do but the most effective I think. This has been already proved by many studies carried out by psycholinguists. Toddlers don't actually talk until they're three,but "meanwile" they absorb all what goes around them subconsciously and consciously too .... long boring story I think you know about it better than me.

mg but you would agree I think that inversions are kind od idiosyncratical gammatiacal deviations in English. Remember you posted the article about paradoxes in English..though it was a bit different.I compare them to Matrix film where some "programs" kicked against restrictions.. and I compare them to russian language. Russian language has seven cases the same as Polish actually you know nominative, accusative,genitive etc. but there's no such thing as inversion in russian language unless I missd something when going to school.

>moreover I listen to the radio( every single
>day at least ten hours and not because I have to but because I love
>it, I don't work because I'm a pensioner so I can devote as much time
>as I want) and belive me nobody ( I listen to Fox News,London Biggest
>Conversation,various talk shows mainly from the US) uses inversions,
>well sporadically it happens of course but anyway it seems to me that
>native speakers are somehow reluctant to use them.
Well, I don't read as much as I wish I did, and most of the books I read are contemporary, nonetheless the inversions don't strike me as odd.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but adults (and not only them - I'll clarify this below) are NOT capable of assimiliating all those English sounds perfectly. They will always be influenced by their mother language. It's a scientifically proven fact.
This does not concern only adults. In fact, only childs below who not yet 10-12 years old have this opportunity. This results from certain biological features of vocal organs.

>but there's no such thing as inversion in russian language
hey, what about the Polish language?

I agree of course about the fact that adults are by all means worse learners as it comes to language than children, I meant that the learning of a foreign language for adults should be based on listening in the first place. Some adults can do better than kids ,believe me, especially those who are very musical and have a good hearing. That's all.
The inversions don't strike me either in a sense of their gramatical complexity but their verbial "permofance". In fact,I think I even like them because of a certain linguistic irregularity is there whatever you stretch it.

Give me some example of inversions in polish language if they are,I am sure you are a better expert on polish than I am.

>>but there's no such thing as inversion in russian language
I have to shatter someone's illusions-inversion is possible in Russian too.I suppose that it is possible and used (at least in poetry) in most if not in all Slavic languages.
Polish, Russian,Ukrainian-for sure
Other Slavic languges? Ask some experts.

Just hobbled home and what I see ..Enough is enough..,when I read your post, I initially greeted it with hilarity and incredulity but quickly it was replaced by derision, and even perhaps bemused rage.Now I am hitting the roof, I've lost my composure, look apparently nobody's cut your down to size for a long time,what? Who've we got here ? Another swelled-head high-hatter schlep who thinks he/she is a shining linguistic star on the arse of humanity? Or someone with an unwarranted self-esteem and exaggerated opinion of himself ? Or you just wanted to butt in your bite? Is my said divination felicitous enough ? You wanna shatter my illusions as for that flaming inversions in russian? Are you kidding me? Let me now adulterate your hyperbolic gray matter "movement" with a bit of common sense. You know, I have a certain presentiment, namely, I think you forgot to bring a number of vital tools when you sat down to write your post .. including your cerebrum. Or may be you behind your medications? Oh yes let me guess, your seemingly positive feedback somewhere between your posterior hypothalamus and cerebral cortex somehow turned out to be negative !!I am sick of this irritatingly incompetent distended drivel with a touch of the hidden acrimoniusness that people like you always foist on others !!!! Now read my lips: I've had a brief fling with Marxism , so to spekak, because I was born and raised in russia,though I am a 100 % POLISH, infants unfortunatelly don't have usually much to say about their place of birth.I am not one of those drunken illitarte retarded shit-stomping schmucks from the East who,slurping a sneaky pete,drive a hard bargain in pidgin polish somewhere on the flea market.I am not fluent in russian, I am not even proficient , but I have an EDUCATED NATIVE COMPETENCY in russian language and I am fully bilingual if know what that means.I've used both polish(thanks to my late mum,God bless her) and russian since I was able to utter my first sound. And you have the audacity to send me to those bloody experts?
You "suppose it is possible and used" "in poetry", "other slavic languages"," ask some experts", oh you're trying to be rhetoric with me here, why don't you ask some experts yourself you brainwashed high-nose klutz you, and get here some would-be examples of these shitting inversions in our langauge if they are? What do you think who you are ? Split the scene !!!If even such a notion as inversions in russian or other slavic languages is there , they are completely different, you chinless air-brain you,because it is contrary to linguistic structure of any inflection language in which group polish and russian are surely in. Of course in both polish and russian we can apply AVS or other word order, whatever the hell it is there with these acronyms, where the logical subject follows all its verb phrase but then its syntactic complexity doesn't clash with us to such an extent as it does in english. Oh yes, I forgot , you're yet another expert on english whom inversions don't strike at all ...
So what you gonna do now ? Wanna lay me into now ? Go head you lummoxed shnook, or you gonna run to the administrator to delete my post because it is not "politically astute" you pussilanimous poltroon you , I don't care what you gonna do , enjoy yourself ..

Go see a shrink. Seriously.

will do

I've got carried away a bit , what , don't care ,,

Did I offend anyone ? No I don't think so, I ma just healthily interactive on this forum, it wasn't in any way offensive, I've called myself many times worse epithets on this forum, so what, Yes I see , this is the same situation like with our president recently in Radio Eska... Ok prosecute me than put me in jail ...