Adverbs followed by verbs of motion
Initial adverbs such as up, down, in and deictics such as here, there and then are commonly used with verbs of motion such as come, go, run. In short spoken utterances they accompany or signal actions, such as In you get! (helping someone into a car) or There/ Here you go! (handing something to someone). There is no inversion when the subject is a pronoun. With a full nominal group, however, the verb and the subject invert: Down came the rain and up went the umbrellas: There goes my last dollar! Here comes the bus. In certain types of written texts such as historical narrative in tourist brochures, this structure can be used to mark a new stage in the narrative, and in such cases usually initiates a new paragraph, as in:
Then came the Norman Conquest.
Only simple tenses are used in this structure, that is, not the progressive or perfect combinations.
Thematized verbs rarely occur in the declarative clause in English. When they do, it is the non-finite part that is thematized:
He told me to run, so run I did. (Unmarked order: He told me to run, so I did run.)
In the media non-finite and finite forms are sometimes fronted, together with the rest of the clause:
Coming up to the stage now is this year’s winner of the Oscar . . . Snapped back the 18-year-old princess: ‘No comment’.
