When the verb precedes the subject in English, this is properly called ***inversion*** of the normal state of affairs. English has two main sorts, *subject–verb inversion* and the related *subject–auxiliary inversion*. # Subject–verb inversion So given an SV (subject–verb) sentence, rendering that as a VS (verb–subject) counts as classic subject–verb inversion. This happens in a broad variety variety of contexts, of which these are merely some common cases: * Is he still here? [*questions*] * Neither am I. [*negatives*] * Around the corner came the screaming fire engine. [*adverbial start*] # Subject–auxiliary inversion As something of a sub-category of this, when you have a compound verb like *do think* or *is running* or *won’t see* or *could have run*, you invert only the first element of the verb. * Does he really think so? * Is he running late? * Won’t he see her already? * Could he have run any faster? This are all cases of subject–auxiliary inversion. Notice that contractions like *won’t* or *can’t* count as auxiliaries in their own right for these purposes. If they had not been contracted, you could not move the negative part: * Will he not see her already? # Other orderings beyond inversion However, English also has plenty of other syntactic variation that is not considered inversion. For example, you can change an SVO sentence to OSV for emphasis: * [Helms too they chose](https://english.stackexchange.com/a/78595/2085), and round shields: [...] Some people loosely refer to any ordering change as “inversion”, but linguists seem to restrict it to SV becomes VS only. So for them, this is not (“technically”?) considered inversion because you aren’t swapping the order of the S and the V: they stay in the same place, and you front the object to the very beginning of the sentence to give it special emphasis. ***This* we also do** from time to time. Historically English also had an SOV ordering, but that now sounds archaic or perhaps poetic. Here is one with straight SOV: * With this ring, I thee wed. And here is one where the object is moved to the middle of the compound verb *do part* so that it comes before the main verb but after the auxiliary: * Till death do us part. No English speech community that I know of still uses SOV in their “normal” speech these days, but you still may find it in deliberately archaizing literary contexts, including poetry.