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It's pretty normal when people use inversion in a sentence like this one (with the aux verb at the front):

"In no way do I agree with what you're saying."

But I'm not sure if these belong to a type of inversion:

"To the west of Ethiopia near the Sudanese border lies a place called the Asosa zone."

"In the middle of the room stands a sculpture by Penny Byrne"

If so, where are the aux verbs? I'm so confused, please help!

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    Does this answer your question? Inversion with a prepositional phrase (and the duplicate). 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' could have been written 'In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit' (but Tolkien was an expert on style as well as all other things English). Inversion after a PP is common, though rather formal / literary. Subject-complement inversion.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Aug 3, 2020 at 11:59
  • Are you sure this type of wording is normal, not fancy speech? The Ethiopia and sculpture lines sound like the theatrical speech of a tour guide or a similar written script.
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Aug 3, 2020 at 12:05
  • It's not about subject-auxiliary inversion but subject-dependent inversion, where the subject and the complement of the verbs “lie” and “stand” have been inverted. The basic order would be “A place called the Asosa zone lies to the west near the Sudanese border” and “A sculpture by Penny Byrne stands in the middle of the room”. –
    – BillJ
    Commented Aug 3, 2020 at 14:39

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