Inlinguistics,inversion is any of several grammatical constructions where two expressions switch their typical or expected order of appearance, that is, they invert. There are several types of subject-verb inversion in English:locative inversion,directive inversion,copular inversion, andquotative inversion. The most frequent type of inversion inEnglish issubject–auxiliary inversion in which anauxiliary verb changes places with itssubject; it often occurs in questions, such asAre you coming?, with the subjectyou being switched with the auxiliaryare. In many other languages, especially those with a freerword order than that of English, inversion can take place with a variety of verbs (not just auxiliaries) and with other syntactic categories as well.

When a layeredconstituency-based analysis of sentence structure is used, inversion often results in thediscontinuity of a constituent, but that would not be the case with a flatterdependency-based analysis. In that regard, inversion has consequences similar to those ofshifting.

A characteristic ofGermanic languages, except modern English, which still has remnants of this principle, is that non-question sentences, includingclauses that aren't themselves questions, have aV2 word order, meaning that thefinite verb is the secondsyntactic constituent in the sentence or clause. This is observed as asubject-verb inversion whenever a preceding constituent displaces the subject from its regular position first in the sentence. However, an unprovoked subject-verb inversion, or what may be described as V1 word order, makes the sentence a question. As a special case, the question phrase can become a non-question if used as acondition, such as "Had I known …". The position of non-finite verbs, which differ between North and West Germanic languages, and English uses more of, do not take part in determining whether the sentence is a question. Neither doquestion words.

Syntax highlighting: In the following table, finite verbs are inred, non-finite verbs are inorange and subjects areblue. Whenever the subject and verb changes places (the inversion occurs), they areitalicized. Words that cause the inversion are ingreen, whereas words that don't are ingrey.

English uses subject-verb inversions less often than other Germanic languages. Broadly, a distinction can be made betweenauxiliary andfull verbs. The auxiliary verbs undergo inversion in more cases than other verbs.

a.Fred will stay.

b.Will Fred stay?- Subject–auxiliary inversion with yes/no question

a.Larry has done it.

b. Whathas Larry done?- Subject–auxiliary inversion with constituent question

a.Fred has helped at no point.

b. At no pointhas Fred helped.- Subject–auxiliary inversion with fronted expression containing negation (negative inversion)

a. Ifwe were to surrender, ...

b.Were we to surrender, ...- Subject–auxiliary inversion in condition clause

The default order in English is subject–verb (SV), but a number of meaning-related differences (such as those illustrated above) motivate the subject and auxiliary verb to invert so that the finite verb precedes the subject; one ends up with auxiliary–subject (Aux-S) order. That type of inversion fails if the finite verb is not an auxiliary:

a.Fred stayed.

b. *Stayed Fred?- Inversion impossible here because the verb is NOT an auxiliary verb

(The star * is the symbol used in linguistics to indicate that the example is grammatically unacceptable.)

In languages like Italian, Spanish, Finnish, etc. subject-verb inversion is commonly seen with a wide range of verbs and does not require an element at the beginning of the sentence. See the following Italian example:

In English, on the other hand, subject-verb inversion generally takes the form of a Locative inversion. A familiar example of subject-verb inversion from English is thepresentationalthere construction.

There's a shark.

English (especially written English) also has an inversion construction involving a locative expression other thanthere ("in a little white house" in the following example):

In a little white house lived two rabbits.^[6]

Contrary to the subject-auxiliary inversion, the verb in cases of subject–verb inversion in English is not required to be an auxiliary verb; it is, rather, a full verb or a form of the copulabe. If the sentence has an auxiliary verb, the subject is placed after the auxiliary and the main verb. For example:

a.A unicorn will come into the room.

b. Into the roomwill come a unicorn.

Since this type of inversion generally places the focus on the subject, the subject is likely to be a full noun or noun phrase rather than a pronoun. Third-personpersonal pronouns are especially unlikely to be found as the subject in this construction:

a. Down the stairscame the dog.- Noun subject

b. Down the stairscame it.- Third-person personal pronoun as subject; unlikely unlessit has special significance and is stressed

c. Down the stairscame I.- First-person personal pronoun as subject; more likely, though stillI would require stress

Certain other languages, like otherGermanic languages andRomance languages, use inversion in ways broadly similar to English, such as in question formation. The restriction of inversion to auxiliary verbs does not generally apply in those languages; subjects can be inverted with any type of verb, but particular languages have their own rules and restrictions.

For example,French can form questions using verb-subject inversions like a Germanic language:tu aimes le chocolat is a declarative sentence meaning "you like the chocolate". When the order of the subjecttu ("you") and the verbaimes ("like") is switched, a question is produced:aimes-tu le chocolat? ("do you like the chocolate?"). Compare withNorwegian:du liker means "you like", whereasliker du would mean "do you like". Note that English obeys the same rule despite its use of the auxiliary word "do": It is the position of the finite verb that determines whether the sentence is a question, and the auxiliary verb takes that place.

In languages withfree word order, inversion of subject and verb or of other elements of a clause can occur more freely, often for pragmatic reasons rather than as part of a specific grammatical construction.

Locative inversion is a common linguistic phenomenon that has been studied by linguists of various theoretical backgrounds.

In multipleBantu languages, such asChichewa,^[7] the locative and subject arguments of certain verbs can be inverted without changing thesemantic roles of those arguments, similar to the English subject-verb inversion examples above. Below are examples fromZulu,^[8] where the numbers indicatenoun classes, SBJ = subject agreement prefix, APPL =applicative suffix, FV = final vowel in Bantu verbal morphology, and LOC is the locativecircumfix foradjuncts.

• Canonical word order:

• Locative inversion:

In the locative inversion example,isikole, "school" acts as the subject of the sentence while semantically remaining a locative argument rather than a subject/agent one. Moreover, we can see that it is able to trigger subject-verbagreement as well, further indicating that it is the syntactic subject of the sentence.

This is in contrast to examples of locative inversion in English, where the semantic subject of the sentence controls subject-verb agreement, implying that it is a dislocated syntactic subject as well:

1. Down the hillrolls thecar.
2. Down the hillroll thecars.

In the English examples, the verbroll agrees in number withcars, implying that the latter is still the syntactic subject of the sentence, despite being in a noncanonical subject position. However, in the Zulu example of locative inversion, it is the nounisikole, "school" that controls subject-verb agreement, despite not being the semantic subject of the sentence.

Locative inversion is observed in Mandarin Chinese. Consider the following sentences:

• Canonical word order

• Locative inversion

In canonical word order, the subject (gǎngshào 'sentry') appears before the verb and the locative expression (ménkǒu 'door') after the verb. In Locative inversion, the two expressions switch the order of appearance: it is the locative that appears before the verb while the subject occurs in postverbal position. In Chinese, as in many other languages, the inverted word order carry apresentational function, that is, it is used to introduce new entities into discourse.^[10]

Syntactic inversion has played an important role in the history of linguistic theory because of the way it interacts with question formation and topic and focus constructions. The particular analysis of inversion can vary greatly depending on the theory of syntax that one pursues. One prominent type of analysis is in terms ofmovement intransformationalphrase structure grammars.^[11] Since those grammars tend to assume layered structures that acknowledge afiniteverb phrase (VP)constituent, they need movement to overcome what would otherwise be adiscontinuity. Independency grammars, by contrast, sentence structure is less layered (in part because a finite VP constituent is absent), which means that simple cases of inversion do not involve a discontinuity;^[12] the dependent simply appears on the other side of its head. The two competing analyses are illustrated with the following trees:

The two trees on the left illustrate the movement analysis of subject-auxiliary inversion in aconstituency-based theory; a BPS-style (bare phrase structure) representational format is employed, where the words themselves are used as labels for the nodes in the tree. The finite verbwill is seen moving out of its base position into a derived position at the front of the clause. The trees on the right show the contrastingdependency-based analysis. The flatter structure, which lacks a finite VP constituent, does not require an analysis in terms of movement but the dependentFred simply appears on the other side of its headWill.

Pragmatic analyses of inversion generally emphasize theinformation status of the two noncanonically-positioned phrases – that is, the degree to which the switched phrases constitutegiven or familiar information vs. new or informative information. Birner (1996), for example, draws on a corpus study of naturally-occurring inversions to show that the initialpreposed constituent must be at least as familiar within the discourse (in the sense of Prince 1992) as the finalpostposed constituent – which in turn suggests that inversion serves to help the speaker maintain a given-before-new ordering of information within the sentence. In later work, Birner (2018) argues that passivization and inversion are variants, oralloforms, of a single argument-reversing construction that, in turn, serves in a given instance as either a variant of a more general preposing construction or a more general postposing construction.

The overriding function of inverted sentences (including locative inversion) ispresentational: the construction is typically used either to introduce a discourse-newreferent or to introduce an event which in turn involves a referent which is discourse-new. The entity thus introduced will serve as thetopic of the subsequent discourse.^[13] Consider the followingspoken Chinese example:

The constituentyí lǎotóur "an old man" is introduced for the first time into discourse in post-verbal position. Once it is introduced by thepresentational inverted structure, it can be coded by the proximaldemonstrative pronounzhè 'this' and then by thepersonal pronountā – denoting anaccessible referent: a referent that is already present in speakers' consciousness.

• Constituent (linguistics)
• Dependency grammar
• Finite verb
• Head (linguistics)
• Phrase structure grammar
• Verb phrase

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• Birner, B. 1996. The discourse function of inversion in English. Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics. NY: Garland.
• Culicover, P. 1997. Principles and parameters: An introduction to syntactic theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Greenbaum, S. and R. Quirk. 1990. A student's grammar of the English language. Harlow, Essex, England: Longman.
• Groß, T. and T. Osborne 2009. Toward a practical dependency grammar theory of discontinuities.SKY Journal of Linguistics 22, 43-90.
• Lena, Ludovica (2020). "Chinese presentational sentences: the information structure of Path verbs in spoken discourse". In Chen, Dongyan; Bell, Daniel (eds.).Explorations of Chinese Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.ISBN 978-1-5275-5994-3.
• Ouhalla, J. 1994. Transformational grammar: From rules to principles and parameters. London: Edward Arnold.
• Prince, E. F. 1992. The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information-status. In W. C. Mann and S. A. Thompson,Discourse description: Diverse linguistic analyses of a fundraising text. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 295-325.
• Shen, J. (1987)."Subject function and double subject construction in mandarin Chinese".Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale.16 (2):195–211.doi:10.3406/clao.1987.1229.
• Quirk, R. S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, and J. Svartvik. 1979. A grammar of contemporary English. London: Longman.
• Radford, A. 1988. Transformational Grammar: A first course. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Radford, A. 2005. English syntax: An introduction. Cambridge University Press.

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