Sometime ago, a student in Cambodia preparing for a special English-language scholarship test sent me e-mail expressing puzzlement over these two sentences:
“Particularly unfortunate was my failure to report exactly the amount of water in the DNA upon which Rosy had done her
measurement.”
“Equally important, however, is the lack of appropriate financial system, including a securities market, to stimulate economic
development.”
The student wondered: “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?”
What she had stumbled upon are, of course, not travesties of grammar but simply inverted sentences of the kind that baffles many learners of English. The normal form of the first sentence is, of course, this: “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 indicated in italics, “
my failure to report exactly the amount of water in the DNA upon which Rosy had done her measurement; its operative verb,
“was,” and its complement is the adjective phrase,
“particularly unfortunate.” The second sentence, in turn, has this normal form: “
However, the lack of appropriate financial system, including a securities market, to stimulate economic development is equally important.” The 15-word noun phrase in italics is the subject;
“is” is the operative verb; and the adjective phrase,
“equally important,” is the complement.
She correctly pointed out that being adjective phrases, “particularly unfortunate” and “equally important” couldn’t be used as subjects in a sentence. In the two inverted sentences, however, they are functioning
as adjective complements and
not as subjects; each had simply been transposed to the beginning of the sentence. There is therefore no grammar violation, only a perfectly acceptable departure from the usual subject-verb-complement (SV/C) pattern of sentences.
The structural differences between normal and inverted sentences are, of course, plain enough to see, but the bigger question is this: What do we really stand to gain by inverting sentences? This is easy to see in the case of the two inverted sentences in question here. Their normal forms are too difficult to read and to understand; their subjects ramble far too slowly and far too long before we can get the sense of what is being said, and their operative verbs come too late in providing that sense. We get confused when we silently read sentences of this kind, and we become breathless when we read them aloud. They are, in fact, nearly the stuff that bad writing is made of.
We find it difficult to comprehend such sentences because in English as in every other language, it’s only after the operative verb or its complement shows up or is heard that the message in a sentence can be clearly grasped. That verb and complement, however, will inevitably be very late in coming when the subject is a longwinded noun phrase, like the 19-word and 15-word behemoths that were formed when we rendered the two sentences in the normal order.
(Discerning writers and speakers are familiar with this phenomenon, of course, so when they sense that their ideas are forcing the operative verb and its complement too far out in the sentence, they bite the bullet, so to speak, and take recourse to
the inverted sentence. They abandon the subject-verb-complement norm and deliver the verb or its complement at whatever position in the sentence where they feel it can do its work best.)
Three patterns of this type of sentence inversion are actually possible, as can be seen in the variations of this SV/C sentence: “My daughter sat by my side.”
Complement-verb-subject pattern (C-V-S): “
By my side sat my daughter.” (The two complicated examples we are examining here use this pattern.)
Complement-subject-verb pattern (C-S-V): “
By my side my daughter
sat.”
Verb-subject-complement pattern (V-S-C): “Sat my daughter
by my side.”
Of course, not all sentences can yield all three of these inversion patterns in meaningful ways, but those that do for at least one or two of the patterns have this virtue:
they can strongly draw our attention to the word or phrase in the sentence that the writer or speaker deems most important. And when used sparingly, such inverted sentences can serve as powerful tools for emphasis in ways not achievable with their normal-order counterparts.
Feel the change of rhythm and emphasis, for instance, when we turn things around in an SV/C sentence like, say, “He seldom confronted bullies; he always tormented weaklings.” Inverted to C-S-V: “Bullies
he seldom confronted; weaklings
he always tormented.” Let’s imagine this sentence suddenly popping out in a sea of normal-pattern sentences, and at once we can see how it can grab our attention and stay in our mind long after we have forgotten the rest of the sentences around it.
Indeed, in surprise lies the power of inverted sentences.
This essay, which first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times
, subsequently became Chapter 75 of my book Giving Your English the Winning Edge
, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times
:Some baffling aspects of inverted sentencesNext week:
Better ways of handling equative constructions (March 6, 2025)
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
