Content introduction chapter word order in english language finding the basic word order functions of sentence word order

Subject—verb inversion
The verb in cases of subject—verb inversion in English is not required to be an auxiliary verb; it is, rather, a full verb or a form of the copula be. If the sentence has an auxiliary verb, the subject is placed after the auxiliary and the main verb. For example:
a. A unicorn will come into the room.
b. Into the room will come a unicorn.
Since this type of inversion generally places the focus on the subject, the subject is likely to be a full noun or noun phrase rather than a pronoun. Third-person personal pronouns are especially unlikely to be found as the subject in this construction:
a. Down the stairs came the dog. - Noun subject
b. ? Down the stairs came it. - Third-person personal pronoun as subject; unlikely unless it has special significance and is stressed
c. Down the stairs came I. - First-person personal pronoun as subject; more likely, though still I would require stress
There are several types of subject-verb inversion in English: locative inversion, directive inversion, copular inversion, and quotative inversion.⁸
The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before and/or after the head noun.

• 
  adjective (red house vs house red)
  
• 
  determiner (this house vs house this)
  
• 
  numeral (two houses vs houses two)
  
• 
  possessor (my house vs house my)
  
• 
  relative clause (the by me built house vs the house built by me)
  

Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions (in London), postpositions (London in), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides) either separately (For whom? or Whom for?) or at the same time (from her away; Dutch example: met hem mee meaning together with him).
There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. For SVO languages, either order is common.
For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture). On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after the heads, such as extraordinaire, which kept its position when borrowed from French.) Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation (шесть домов=six houses, домов шесть=circa six houses).