High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In linguistics, negative inversion is one of many types of subject-auxiliary inversion in English. A negation (e.g. not, no, never, nothing, etc.) or a word that implies negation (only, hardly, scarcely) or a phrase containing one of these words precedes the finite auxiliary verb necessitating that the subject and finite verb undergo inversion. Negative inversion is a phenomenon of English syntax. The V2 word order of the other Germanic languages (other than English) does not allow one to acknowledge negative inversion as a specific phenomenon, since the V2 principle of those languages, which is mostly absent from English, allows inversion to occur much more broadly than in English. While negative inversion is a common occurrence in English, a solid understanding of just what elicits the inversion has not yet been established. It is, namely, not entirely clear why certain fronted expressions containing a negation elicit negative inversion, but others do not.