LL-L "Grammar" 2011.05.03 (02) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 03 May 2011 - Volume 02
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From: Alfred Brothers alfredb at erols.com

Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2011.05.02 (06) [EN]

Reinhard/Ron wrote:

            At first thought I assumed that this and what I call "narrative
construction" are separate. At second thought, however, I wonder if they are
in fact related. "Setting the stage," so to speak, the VS construction makes
the listener expect a result or at least continuation. See what I'm driving
at? So, if in German you say *Ein Mann geht zum Arzt* (A man goes to a/his
doctor) it could be the end of the story. However, if you say *Geht ein Mann
zum Arzt* ("Goes a man to a/his doctor") you definitely expect more.

What do you think, Lowlanders?

Furthermore, I have a feeling that this VS construction used to be used in
earlier varieties of English, though I can't come up with concrete examples
at this very moment. Perhaps they are not directly linked, but you find VS
in certain types of clauses, such as "'Enough!' say I (~ says I)." I assume
that these are archaisms hailing back to greater syntactic flexibility in
English.


Hi, Ron,

Interesting topic -- enough to get me out of "lurk-mode" after a long
silence.

I can't think of any instance where, in modern American English, we use VS
except in the well known situations:  1) Questions:  "Can you help me?" 2)
After direct quotes, "'No,' replied the man angrily." 3) Following
restrictive adverbs, "Never did I...", "Hardly had he opened the door...",
"Seldom does she visit on Sundays...." 4) After "There/Here" initially in a
sentence. "Here comes Jack Jones." I'm at a loss to find an occasion where
we use VS *initially *in the sentence (except in questions).

However, we do seem to have a convention similar in many ways to the other
Germanic languages described in this thread. In jokes, narratives, etc., we
will often start the first sentence with SV, but we'll turn the second
sentence around somewhat into an unconventional VS format. For example, "The
man is sitting at the bar. In walks his next-door neighbor...."; "The woman
is sitting upstairs in the living room. Up the stairs comes her daughter in
a big rush...." As in the German example you gave (*Geht ein Mann zum
Arzt*...),
these second sentences also give the idea that something else is coming. If
not, we would say "His next-door neighbor walks in" and "Her daughter came
running up the stairs..." Starting the sentence with the
adverbial/prepositional phrase makes you wonder what happened next.

It's interesting, too, that these VS examples cannot be used if the subject
is a personal pronoun. Other pronouns are okay. ("In he walks...", but "In
walks someone I don't recognize...") This is also the case in sentences
starting with "There/Here..." ("Here comes Jack Jones" but not "Here comes
he.")

I feel the use of this second-sentence VS form is the same thing as in the
other languages discussed, but English has to treat it a little differently
because of stricter word order rules.

Something related, but not so easy to recognize in English because of our
use of the progressive tenses: "Sitting at the counter is a man dressed in
black, when in comes a co-worker he's trying to avoid ..." Is "sitting" a
present participle modifying the man, or is it part of a VS construction for
"A man dressed in black *is sitting* at the counter,..."?

I'm going to dig out my Middle/Old English books when I get a chance to see
whether there are better examples from an earlier stage of the language.

Regards,
Alfred Brothers
Falls Church, VA

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