In day to day English it is inevitable to hear examples of sentences that do not follow the basic rules. To gain fluency it is necessary to consider different patterns and orders which do not follow basic principles. Whilst for example questions and statements can be distinguished through intonation in many languages, in English we use grammar to make this distinction.
In linguistics typology, SVO defines the ‘basic’ sentence structure:
John loved the vegan lasagne.
The car hit the wall.
The thief steals mobile phones.
Question forms
With single verb phrases, we use a ‘dummy’ auxiliary: ‘Do’ you run? ‘Did’ you climb? ‘Don’t’ they listen?’
Where the verb phrases comprise with am, is was or were, the subject and verb are reversed: Are you at home?
With an auxiliary verb, we reverse the subject and auxiliary verb: Could this change anything?
To get information about the subject; the subject is the answer to the question: What happened here?
Fronting information
Generally speaking, adverbials appear at the end of a sentence.
Studying English is an incredible thing to do, basically.
I am not happy at all.
It is broken completely!
Adverbials sometimes can appear at the beginning of the sentence:
Basically, I wish things were different.
The whole time I was really bored!
On the whole, the idea of leaving is absurd!
Negative adverbials
When using negative adverbials, we may ‘front’ a sentence for affect. ‘Fronting’ in this context is when we put the adverbial at the front of the sentence:
Only at the end did we realise that everything was OK.
Nowhere could we find our teacher, he just disappeared!
Only rarely do is it possible to learn English without practise.
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