"Not once but twice" triggers subj-aux inversion?

[Dan Goncharoff]

The way I think of a rule, it can't start with the words "in general".
Perhaps your notion of a rule is less strict than mine?

My approach to this is heavily influenced by years of explaining English to
German speakers. In German, rules are rules. For example, if memory serves,
there are only three German words that violate pronunciation rules, and only
one of them is common, the word for snow.
DanG


On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 8:17 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Not once but twice" triggers subj-aux inversion?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry, I just don't get it. If someone is trying to say that usually the
> > "subj-aux inversion" is associated with negative adverbials, I can buy
> that.
> >
> > If someone is trying to say that it is wrong to change word order to make
> a
> > point, to add emphasis, even to just sound poetic (or pretentious), I
> have
> > to disagree. It's is one of the great joys of English that we are not
> stuck
> > with a lot of rules for word order.
>
> I agree.
>
> But we *do* have a lot of rules restricting possible word-order. If we
> didn't, then there would be nothing of interest having to do with
> word-order. A change in word-order couldn't be emphatic, poetic,
> pretentious or whatever, because it's not possible for there to be a
> change, unless there's a rules that says, "In general, you can do only
> X. For if, instead, you do Y, people are going to consider you to be
> pretentiously emphatic, emphatically pretentious, or whatever."
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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