Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[faith2k]

I am often confused about the subject verb inversion rule when adverb or adverbial phrase comes at the beginning of a sentence. It looks like subject verb inversion does not occur in every case.

In the following sentence, for example?

1. Not surprisingly did they miss the train. (Is this acceptable?)
2. Not surprisingly they miss the train. ( I know this is correct when you add comma after Not surprisingly)

Thank you.

[redset]

(2) is almost fine, except it's in the present tense (it should be missed if you want it to match the past tense of the first sentence).

(1) might be acceptable in very old English (from hundreds of years ago), it would sound very dated now. As far as I know it's technically correct, but people don't speak that way now - your second sentence would be used instead. To me, (1) sounds like the way they missed the train wasn't surprising - like they didn't miss it by running backwards, or by arriving by hot-air balloon, or by trying to enter the train through the window. Those would all be surprising ways to miss the train! It's the difference between the fact being surprising ('they missed the train - that's surprising!') and the manner being surprising ('they missed the train in a really surprising way!').

Something like "not quickly did he make his way to the classroom" makes sense, because the adverb describes how he made his way - it just sounds very formal and dated. Surprisingly is a comment adverb (your opinion of the entire event or fact), and we don't invert for those.

Basically inversion used to be much more common in English in the past, now it happens in much fewer cases. I'll give you a quick run-down from my copy of Practical English Usage (great book by the way):

After negative and restrictive expressions (formal):
Under no circumstances can we cash cheques.
Not until he received her letter did he fully understand her feelings.
also after restrictive words like hardly, seldom, rarely, little, never, and only + time expression
Little did she know!
Never have I tasted such a delicious drink
Only after an hour did I start to think they weren't coming.
Not only did she win the race, she beat the world record too!

We don't use it after not far or not long.

We also use them in speech with here, there and other short adverbs:

Here comes the sun!
I watered my seeds, and up popped a cabbage.

We don't do this for pronouns though:
Here he comes!
[i]I watered my seeds, and up they popped.

[faith2k]

Thank you for the answer.

You are right. I meant to write, "Not surprisingly they missed the train."

[redset]

I had more of a think about this and I reckon this might clear it up. Here's a statement:

He crashed the car.

We can add some comment adjectives to this to express our opinion about it:

Stupidly, he crashed the car.

The adverb stupidly relates to the statement - we're giving our opinion of what happened. He crashed the car, which was a stupid thing to do. The information in the statement isn't changed, we're just adding our personal opinion to it. Now compare with this:

He crashed the car stupidly.

What we're saying now is that the way he crashed the car was stupid. It implies there are some ways to crash the car which wouldn't be stupid, but the way he crashed it was stupid. So this isn't a comment adverb, it describes how the crash happened.

With this use of an adverb we can invert the subject and verb:

Stupidly did he crash the car.

Like I said this sounds very dated and formal, or literary - but it is perfectly acceptable. Stupidly is an important part of the statement, we can't remove it because it would change the meaning. A comment adverb, however, is basically superfluous - it's not actually a part of the statement, it's not necessary. If you removed stupidly from the sentence above, you would get:

Did he crash the car.

This doesn't make sense. The inversion was used to rearrange a statement with an adverb, and when it's gone you have a grammatical problem! We'd have to write the statement as:

He crashed the car.

And now we can add comment adverbs to it if we like.


So in your example not surprisingly is a comment adverb - you're giving your opinion: they missed the train, and this wasn't surprising. You wouldn't use inversion in this case because the adverb isn't modifying the verb, it's a comment about the entire statement.

A shorter version: if the adverb is part of the clause itself, you can rearrange the words in the clause to put the adverb somewhere else. If the adverb is separate, you can't!

[faith2k]

Very clear now!
Thank you very much for such an elaborate explanations.
And thank you for the book recommendation!