61
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Why isn't "witness" the third-person singular form in the example sentence?
I think this usage is an imperative, of the suggesting type. This dictionary agrees:
Merriam-Webster witness
verb 4b : to take note of
our grammar—witness our verb system—is a marvel of flexibility, ...
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Why isn't "witness" the third-person singular form in the example sentence?
To witness something is to observe it. The sentence could be paraphrased
Authentic Italian cooking is very healthy —— observe (as evidence) the low incidence of heart disease in Italy.
"Look at ...
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19
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What is “were’t”?
In my copy there is a space: were 't aught to me.... It's fairly common to encounter 't for it (also seen in 'tis for "it is"), and that is what it means here. As you may know, aught means ...
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18
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How does the "reverse syntax" in Middle English work?
First, a point of clarification. The "Therefore did Tristan claim justice..." passage that you quote seems to be from a translation made sometime around 1900 by Hilaire Belloc of an ...
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11
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When "be it" is at the beginning of a sentence, what kind of structure do you call it?
In terms of morphology, the verb is in the subjunctive mood (be rather than indicative is).
In terms of word order, we’re dealing with a case of subject-auxiliary inversion (be before the subject).
In ...
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Is "don't" a particle of its own?
Questions like Why do you play chess? display subject auxiliary inversion; the auxiliary verb do appears before the subject you.
In a normal declarative clause, the adverb not occurs after the first ...
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10
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Why isn't "witness" the third-person singular form in the example sentence?
The sentence Authentic Italian cooking is very healthy —— witness the low incidence of heart disease in Italy. is an example of parataxis: two short complete sentences that are combined without any ...
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9
votes
Inversion after "only a few years ago"
The presenting question asks about this grammatical sentence
[I'll return to the bracketed expressions below]
[Only a few years ago] the herring gull [more often than not] remained close to the ...
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7
votes
Can a positive statement be combined with a positive question tag like "did you" or is "didn't you" necessary?
Tag questions always swap negative values; like multiplying by minus one.
Although tags with two negatives are impossible:
*You never went there, didn't you?
*She isn't coming tonight, isn't she?
...
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7
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Does the sentence 'Boy, are my arms tired' mean 'Boy, my arms are tired.'?
After a short interjection of amazement / delight / relief / exhaustion, inversion is not uncommon but only with a limited subset of interjections:
"Wow, is she having fun!" [YouTube; ...
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6
votes
Inversion is not used after "not far/long"
My guess is that the subject-auxiliary inversion associated with negative or restrictive expressions is permitted only when the negation semantically applies at the clause level.
“Not a single word ...
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6
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"implies the narrator"?
The grammar is exactly the same: it is an instance of what Wikipedia calls quotative inversion.
However, whereas the verb says does indicate that the text contains a direct quotation, implies does not ...
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5
votes
What is (do) for here?
Only often triggers "inversion", where the subject and verb switch places. A simpler example of that might be:
Only later are we told why.
(meaning "We aren't told why until later&...
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Is there a grammatical term for moving a word to the front or back of a sentence?
Moving an element to the front of a clause (often in order to emphasise it) is, quite logically, called fronting.
This is different from inversion (as mentioned in tchrist’s answer) in that inversion ...
5
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How does the "reverse syntax" in Middle English work?
These are examples of subject-auxiliary inversion, where the subject switches places with an auxiliary verb (which, here, includes forms of "to be").
Generally, you see inversions in questions, ...
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5
votes
Why you're laughing vs Why are you laughing?
Generally, when you ask a wh-question (that is, a question beginning with "who," "what," "when," "where," "why," or "how"), you must use subject–auxiliary inversion. By "must," I mean that your ...
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Why can you say “not only will I” but not “not only I will”?
When a negative phrase like not only is moved from its usual position after the first auxiliary verb (or before the main verb if there's no auxiliary) to the beginning of the sentence (usually to ...
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What Is 'Given' Information according to the 'Given-before-New' Principle?
The relevant concepts are discourse-new and discourse-old (or "familiar" — or "given") information. Old information in understood as anything that is familiar in a given discourse. ...
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4
votes
Inversion with a prepositional phrase
A. Under the window there stood a vase.
This is a presentational construction using a dummy there as Subject. The Locative Adjunct has been fronted. If we didn't have the fronting it would read:
...
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4
votes
Accepted
Conditional clause
Only backshifting, not subjunctive
Reduce it to its most straightforward word order, and the answer will become clear:
I realized that active contemplation would be needed if I ?were to find any ...
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4
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"Here comes the Queen" versus "Here the Queen comes"
I'd think it'd be helpful to think of it as a matter of information packaging, rather than inversion, which is a somewhat artificial concept.
In English, the informational focus of a clause tends to ...
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"Here comes the Queen" versus "Here the Queen comes"
EDIT
While searching Subject-dependent inversion "here comes" on Google, among the first two results were the following EL&U and ELL questions, both questions answered but only the first OP ...
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4
votes
How do you use "which" when asking a question
The standard word order for questions with an interrogative — who (whom), why, where, which, what, and how — places the interrogative or its phrase as the first element in a clause immediately ...
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4
votes
"Is there" or "there is"?
The correct order in the sentence is “there is”.
The inversion of the subject-verb word order mainly occurs in questions. When the interrogative clause is a question on its own, the correct order is “...
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English Subject-auxiliary inversion
The only time outside of poetry that I can think of where it is not optional would be in the so-called tag question.
Bob likes elephants, doesn't he?
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Why is "did" before the subject to show emphasis?
The basic sentence here would be:
- This woman had a long memory.
With the emphatic 'do', it would be:
- This woman did have a long memory.
The sentence you give here is actually using the verb '...
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4
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Accepted
what does X mean vs what does it mean X
Your intuition that it is about length is spot on. One of the reasons to use a cleft sentence is certainly to ease the burden of processing a long descriptive phrase. It lets the right tail of the ...
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"What went we out into this wilderness to find?" This sentence is grammatically correct. How?
Do you mean The Witch? It is set in the 1630s. In English then, subject-verb inversion was grammatical with any verb, not just with auxiliary verbs and modal verbs, as today.
By contrast, in modern ...
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Why is the structure interrogative-which-word – subject – verb (including question mark) being used so often? Is it grammatical?
I'd say that the first question is too open to guessed answers.
The second question does possibly meet site requirements, but answers to this will also contain opinion. Mine is that using question ...
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The problem with "there"
Short answer. Tldr:
The noun phrase that we would normally expect after the verb be in an existential construction has been moved to the end of the clause. In this particular case this means that the ...
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