In many other languages, especially those with a freer word order than that of English, inversion can take place with a variety of verbs (not just auxiliaries) and with other syntactic categories as well.
The position of non-finite verbs, which differ between North and West Germanic languages, and English uses more of, do not take part in determining whether the sentence is a question.
That type of inversion fails if the finite verb is not an auxiliary: (The star * is the symbol used in linguistics to indicate that the example is grammatically unacceptable.)
For example, French can form questions using verb-subject inversions like a Germanic language: tu aimes le chocolat is a declarative sentence meaning "you like the chocolate".
When the order of the subject tu ("you") and the verb aimes ("like") is switched, a question is produced: aimes-tu le chocolat?
In languages with free word order, inversion of subject and verb or of other elements of a clause can occur more freely, often for pragmatic reasons rather than as part of a specific grammatical construction.
Below are examples from Zulu,[8] where the numbers indicate noun classes, SBJ = subject agreement prefix, APPL = applicative suffix, FV = final vowel in Bantu verbal morphology, and LOC is the locative circumfix for adjuncts.
However, in the Zulu example of locative inversion, it is the noun isikole, "school" that controls subject-verb agreement, despite not being the semantic subject of the sentence.
In Chinese, as in many other languages, the inverted word order carry a presentational function, that is, it is used to introduce new entities into discourse.
[10] Syntactic inversion has played an important role in the history of linguistic theory because of the way it interacts with question formation and topic and focus constructions.
[11] Since those grammars tend to assume layered structures that acknowledge a finite verb phrase (VP) constituent, they need movement to overcome what would otherwise be a discontinuity.
The flatter structure, which lacks a finite VP constituent, does not require an analysis in terms of movement but the dependent Fred simply appears on the other side of its head Will.
Birner (1996), for example, draws on a corpus study of naturally-occurring inversions to show that the initial preposed constituent must be at least as familiar within the discourse (in the sense of Prince 1992) as the final postposed constituent – which in turn suggests that inversion serves to help the speaker maintain a given-before-new ordering of information within the sentence.
[13] Consider the following spoken Chinese example: ZhènghǎoJusttóuliaheadguò-laipass-comeyíone-CLlǎotóur,old-manZhènghǎo tóuli guò-lai yí lǎotóur,Just ahead pass-come one-CL old-man'Right then came over an old man.