Like the Cambodian student who wrote me years ago as she was preparing for an English-language scholarship test, you’d probably be initially puzzled by these two sentence constructions:
(1) “Particularly unfortunate was my failure to report exactly the amount of water in the DNA upon which Rosy had done her measurement.”
(2) “Equally important, however, is the lack of appropriate financial system, including a securities market, to stimulate economic development.”
Vika D. commented: “These two sentences are strange to me because ‘particularly unfortunate’ and ‘equally important’ are adjective phrases. What I know is that adjectives cannot be used as subjects, so why are they being used as subjects in those two sentences?”
Puzzling they might be, but those two inverted constructions can serve to clarify or dramatize the sense of sentences.
Sentence 1 has this normal form: “
My failure to report exactly the amount of water in the DNA upon which Rosy had done her measurement was particularly unfortunate.”
(Its subject is the 19-word noun phrase in italics; its operative verb, “was”; and its complement, the adjective phrase “particularly unfortunate.”)
Sentence 2 has this normal form: “However,
the lack of appropriate financial system, including a securities market, to stimulate economic development is equally important.”
(The 14-word noun phrase is the subject; “is,” the operative verb; and the adjective phrase “equally important,” the complement.)
Vika correctly pointed out that being adjective phrases, neither “particularly unfortunate” and “equally important” can be the subject of a sentence. They are indeed functioning as adjective complements as they should, but each has been transposed to the beginning of the sentence. There’s no grammar violation in doing this, for both inversions are acceptable departures from the normal subject-verb-complement (SV/C) sentence pattern.
IMAGE CREDIT: LONGMAN ENGLISH GRAMMAR AT SLIDESHARE.COMThe structural differences between normal and inverted sentences are plain enough to see, but the bigger question is: What’s to be gained by inverting sentences that way?
Look back and examine more closely the normal-order form of the inverted sentences that baffled Vika. You’ll find that both Sentence 1 and Sentence 2 are tougher to read and understand than their inverted constructions. Their subjects ramble too slowly and too long for us to make a clear sense of what’s being said, and their operative verbs come too late in providing that sense. We get breathless reading such sentences.
The reason for this is that in English as in every other language, it’s only after the operative verb or its complement is said or heard can the sense of the sentence be clearly grasped. When the subject of the sentence is too longwinded, that operative verb and that complement do their job too late in completing the intended message.
This phenomenon in language is familiar to discerning writers and speakers, so when they sense that their ideas are forcing the operative verb and its complement to go too far out in the sentence, they bite the bullet, so to speak, and take recourse to the inverted sentence. This is because when used prudently and sparingly, inverted sentences can serve as powerful tools for emphasis in ways not achievable by their normal-order counterparts. They can more strongly draw attention to the word or phrase in the sentence that the writer or speaker deems most important.
Take this normal-order sentence: “He seldom confronted bullies; he always tormented weaklings.” Feel the change of rhythm and emphasis when we turn things around by inverting that sentence in this complement-subject-verb (C-S-V) order: “Bullies he seldom confronted; weaklings he always tormented.”
When a sentence like that suddenly pops out in a sea of normal-pattern sentences, we’ll discover right away why it grabs attention and stays in the mind long after the rest of the sentences around it are forgotten.
Indeed, in surprise lies the power of inverted sentences.
(Next:
Not all our assertions can be established truths) January 14, 2021
This essay, 2,027th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the January 7, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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