Today is an English lesson in a blog post. Don’t worry, that scary sounding word in the title is actually much simpler (and more familiar) than it may seem. I’m sure you’ve used this grammar (or rather, figure of speech) at some point in your life. So what is it? What does it do? And why do you care?
What is it?
An anastrophe is a figure of speech in which the word order is changed from the natural subject-verb-object, to object-subject-verb, for example.
What does it do?
When using an anastrophe you can emphasize a word which would normally be lost in the sentence. This can make your point stronger and really draw the attention of the listener to a specific word. Common examples of this are Never have I ever done such a thing and This I have got to see. In both of these scenarios, we are emphasizing the first word of the sentence.
Why do you care?
Rather than why you do care, I’ll tell you why you should care. This can be a very useful literary tool. In the above examples, we can really express how important a thing is to us. In the phrase Never have I ever you can express your near disgust that someone would even insinuate that you’d do such a thing. Although, this phrase is also used in a popular game played innocently by middle schoolers, or as a drinking game by adults.
Otherwise, sentences like This I have got to see really show your interest, enthusiasm, or absolute marvel at something that is about to occur.
Or, you could just use it to sound like Yoda all the time.
Funnily enough, anastrophe’s and Japanese do not have the same word order. English is SVO (subject verb object), anastrophe’s are OSV, and Japanese is SOV.
I hope you learned something! And if not, I’m sorry for wasting your time. I just found this interesting and wanted to share! I had never really realized that this was a proper phenomena in the English language before now.
Until next time!! xx
Jessica's English Corner 