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The words in an English sentence are arranged in a certain order which is fixed for every type of sentence and is meaningful. There are two ways of arranging words – direct order and inverted.
The most common pattern for the arrangement of the main parts in a sentence is Subject – Predicate – Object. Inappropriate word order may lead to incoherence, clumsy style and lack of clarity.
End-focus: the new or most important idea in a piece of information should be placed toward the end, where in speech nuclear stress normally fallsa sentence is generally more effective.
End-weight: the more weighty part of a sentence should be placed towards the end. Otherwise the sentence may sound awkward and unbalanced.
The other common pattern of word order is the inversion. In wide sense, the inversion is any alteration in the order of the elements of the sentence. In definite sense, it refers to a relative position of the subject and the predicate.
Types of inversion:
 Structural types of inversion (what is placed before the subject)
 Subject-verb (full) inv
 Subject-operator/auxiliary (partial)
 Functional types of inversion
 Grammatical – to express grammatical relation
 In questions;
 In subordinate clauses of condition or concession
 join esasyndecally;
 Communicative
 Introductory there;
 Short answered with neither, so, nor;
 Fronted adverbial;
 Emphatic
 Fronted negators and seminegators (only Partial inversion);
 Fronted (subject) complement;
 Fronting of some adverbials (manner, direction, place);
 Word :only” (part inv).
Ways of giving prominence to this or that part of the sentence:
a) Fronting means to put a member of a sentence at the beginning of the sentence, at an unusual place;
b) Cleft-sentence, it and wh- type;
c) Auxiliary do;
d) The passive;
e) Subordinate clauses with demonstratives.