Negative inversion

In linguistics, negative inversion is one of many types of subject–auxiliary inversion in English. A negation (e.g. not, no, never, nothing, etc.) or a word that implies negation (only, hardly, scarcely) or a phrase containing one of these words precedes the finite auxiliary verb necessitating that the subject and finite verb undergo inversion. Negative inversion is a phenomenon of English syntax. Other Germanic languages have a more general V2 word order, which allows inversion to occur much more often than in English, so they may not acknowledge negative inversion as a specific phenomenon. While negative inversion is a common occurrence in English, a solid understanding of just what elicits the inversion has not yet been established. It is, namely, not entirely clear why certain fronted expressions containing a negation elicit negative inversion, but others do not. As with subject-auxiliary inversion in general, negative inversion results in a discontinuity and so is a problem for theories of syntax. The problem exists both for the relatively layered structures of phrase structure grammars as well as for the flatter structures of dependency grammars. Negative inversion is illustrated with the following b-sentences. The relevant expression containing the negation is underlined, and the subject and finite verb are bolded: a. Sam will relax at no time. b. At no time will Sam relax. - Negative inversion a. Jim has never tried that. b. Never has Jim tried that. - Negative inversion a. He would do a keg stand at no party. b. At no party would he do a keg stand. - Negative inversion When the phrase containing the negation appears in its canonical position to the right of the verb, standard subject-auxiliary word order obtains. When the phrase is fronted, as in the b-sentences, subject-auxiliary inversion, (negative inversion) must occur. If negative inversion does not occur in such cases, the sentence is bad, as the following c-sentences illustrate: c. *At no time, Sam will relax. - Sentence is bad because negative inversion has not occurred.