- Inverted sentence
An inverted sentence is one in which the subject appears after the
verb . This construction causes the subject to receive moreemphasis .An exception occurs when the verb is
intransitive ::"Down the street lived the man and his wife without anyone suspecting that they were really spies for a foreign power."
Because there's no object following the verb, the noun phrase after the verb "lived" can be decoded as subject without any problem.Examples
Inversion after initial negatives:
*Never will I do that again!
*Rarely have I eaten better food.
*Hardly ever does he come to class on time.
*Not until a frog develops lungs does it leave the water and live on the land.
*Not only was Mary Ann Shadd famous for helping escaped slaves, she was also the first African Canadian woman to establish a newspaper.
*Hardly ever have there been so many choices for young people entering the work force as there are today..Inversion after other structures:
*So high is Mount Everest that climbers can take only a couple of steps per minute as they near the summit.
*Off the coast of North Carolina lie the Barrier Islands, a popular summer resort area.
*Only after the earthquake had taken place did the lack of safety measures become obvious.Others:
*A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give away abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the stucture and texture of a flower.
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