Why can't I quite put the sentence like this? [closed]
Solution 1:
The reason you cannot do this under fronting is that this is not fronting. Fronting is when you pull up a syntactic constituent that normally falls to the right of the verb so that it falls to the left. It’s most often seen when the complement is fronted in SVO to produce OSV.
- I knew the men. Their wives I knew as well.
But you are talking about inversion, which is something else again. Inversion swaps the order of subject and verb. Fronting is distinct and does not on its own trigger inversion. Notice how it didn’t do so with their wives above.
Yes, there are places where fronting combines with inversion, but this is not one of them. But you could make it be so if you chose a negative of some sort to front.
The easiest way to do this is with a negative adverb or adverbial phrase, which provides for negative inversion:
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There was never a boy like Santiago. Never was there a boy like Santiago.
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A boy like Santiago is seldom seen here. Seldom is a boy like Santiago seen here.
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Santiago was nowhere to be found. Nowhere was Santiago to be found.
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Santiago was in no way finished. In no way was Santiago finished.
In all those cases, the negative that used to follow the verb was fronted to the beginning of the sentence, and this triggered subject–verb inversion.
Superlatives can also be a kind of inversion trigger when fronted:
- Santiago came last. Last came Santiago.
- Santiago came earliest. Earliest came Santiago.
- Santiago was the oldest. Oldest was Santiago.
- Santiago was the youngest of all of them. Youngest of all of them was Santiago.
But once is not one a superlative. The extent to which superlatives are or can ever be accounted a negative polarity item for such purposes, and others, is another topic for another question.