Talk:Subject–auxiliary inversion

Languages other than English

Should connect this with verb inversion in languages other than English... AnonMoos (talk) 19:21, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Advice

Is that fine:?

"Only if the weather is good, will we go away."

-- Ewa 19:51, 26 February 2008 83.29.241.198

I guess, but probably the comma should be omitted... AnonMoos (talk) 19:21, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Recent additions

Victor, your recent additions to the introduction are good. In particular, I agree that the old formulation incorrectly implied that subject-auxiliary inversion does not occur in other (related) languages, when of course it does. --Tjo3ya (talk) 16:03, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Glad we agree about something, anyway. I think we need to treat this article as the one that focuses on English (since the specificity of its title is appropriate only to English, as far as I know), and ensure that the other one - Inversion (linguistics) - treats the subject in general, without having everything dominated a priori by English. Victor Yus (talk) 17:06, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Victor, I mostly agree here, and the comment is mostly consistent with my intent for the two articles. I can support expanding this article so that it contains separate sections for the various types of subject-auxiliary inversion, e.g. yes/no-questions, constituent questions, negative inversion, than-inversion, so-inversion, etc.

The part on negative inversion can be brief, since I am currently drafting a full length article on negative inversion, which you can take a look at here. Negative inversion is a fascinating phenomenon, since it really is not clear when it should and should not occur.

One thing that is crucial to me is that any additions/changes to this article and to the others that I have worked on and patrol is that the examples be set off. This is important, since it reduces the density of the text and makes the article more accessible to a wider audience.

Concerning the article on inversion, I am indeed in favor of expanding it so that it accommodates data from other languages. But again, I really think that for these Wikipedia articles to be accessible to a wide audience, the discussion should begin mainly with English data when possible. The discussion of English data provides the necessary orientation so that the reader will be in a stronger position to understand the data from other languages. --Tjo3ya (talk) 07:10, 7 October 2012 (UTC)