1

What is this inversion rule? I heard "After bad weather comes fine weather", it was obvious for me that the word "comes" here was related to "fine weather". Yes, I learnt that English has SVO word order and we use inversion when we're asking questions. But this also actually sounds very natural. Or "here comes the car". I have no problems with understanding it, maybe because my native Russian has a lot of inversion depending on meaning nuances, so it's natural for me. What is this inversion rule called? In which situations do English native speakers use this word order? Seems like the "SVO word order" rule is not so strict in some cases.

4
  • Since come is intransitive, there can be no object, so SVO doesn't apply. But there does appear to be some form of inversion.
    – Andrew Leach
    Mar 29 at 12:56
  • 2
  • "What is this inversion rule called?" Besides "inversion" (or "subject-verb inverstion", etc.), this is also often called "AVS word order" (where AVS = adverbial-verb-subject). Mar 29 at 14:06
  • It's called subject-dependent inversion, i.e. where the subject is inverted with another dependent of the verb, in this case with the complement of "comes". This type of inversion puts the subject in final position wheres it typically receives greater phonological prominence than in its basic position. Your other example, "Here comes the bus", syntactically has inversion too, but it is not replaceable by canonical "The bus comes here".
    – BillJ
    Mar 29 at 15:48

0

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.