Stylistic Inversion

Word-order is a crucial syntactical problem in many languages. In English it has peculiarities-which have been caused by the concrete and specific way the language has developed. O. Jespersen states that the English language “...has developed a tolerably fixed word-order which in the great majority of cases shows without fail what is the Subject of the sentence.” This “tolerably fixed word-order” is Subject-Verb (Predicate)-Object (S-P-O). Further, Jespersen mentions a statistical investigation of word-order made on the basis of a series of {representative 19th per cent of all sentences containing all three members, while the percentage for Beowult was 16 and for King Alfred’s prose 40.

Thus in Dicken’s much quoted sentence:

“Talent Mr. Micawber has; capital Mr. Micawber has not.”

The first and the last positions being prominent, the verb has the negative not get a fuller volume of stress than they would in ordinary (uninverted) word-order. In traditional word-order the predicates have and have not are closely attached to their object talent and capital. English predicate-object groups are so bound together that when we tear the object away from its predicate, the latter remains dangling in the sentence and in this position sometimes call forth a change in meaning of the predicate word. In the inverted word-order not only the object talent and capital become conspicuous but also the predicates has and has not.

The following patterns of stylistic inversion are most frequently met “in both English prose and English poetry.

1. The object is placed at the beginning of the sentence(see the example above)

2. The attribute is placed after the word it modefies (postposition of the attribute). This model is often used when there is more than one attribute, for example:

“Win finger weary and worn...” (Thomas Hood)

“Once upon a midnight dreary...” (E.A.Poe)

3. a) The predicate is placed before the subject,as in

“A good generous prayer it was.” (Mark Twain)

b) the predicate stands before the link-verb and both are placed before the subject, as in “Rude am I in many speech...” (Shakespeare)

4. The adverbial modifier is placed at the beginning of the sentence, as in: “Eagerly i wished the morrow.” (Poe)

“My dearest daughter, at your feet I fall.”(Dryden)

“A tone of most extraordinary comparison Miss Tox said in it.”(Dickens)

5. Both modifier and predicate stand before the subject, as in:

“In went Mr.Pickwick.” (Dickens)

“Down dropped the breeze...”(Coleridge)

These five models comprise the most common and recognized models of inversion.

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