1228. This week, we look at why "Here comes the bride" sounds right but "Here comes he" sounds wrong. Then we have an update on Zipf's law: after whales and dolphins, researchers may have found it in birdsong too.
1228. This week, we look at why "Here comes the bride" sounds right but "Here comes he" sounds wrong. Then we have an update on Zipf's law: after whales and dolphins, researchers may have found it in birdsong too.
The "here comes he" segment was written by Ray Belli, a longtime podcaster, musician, and language writer. You can find him at http://wordsforgranted.libsyn.com/
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. This week, we'll talk about why "Here comes the bride" sounds right but "Here comes he" doesn't, and then I have an update about Zipf's law.
by Ray Belli
Here comes the bride. Down came the rain. There goes the neighborhood. Here comes the sun.
These are familiar English phrases. At a glance, they seem unremarkable. The words are simple. Their meanings are clear. Yet each of these sentences uses an unusual form of English word order: the subject comes after the verb.
In English, the subject of a sentence usually comes first, followed by the verb. For example: I run. You go. She sleeps. But in the phrases we just looked at, the verb comes before the subject. (Here comes the bride.) If we convert these phrases into the usual English word order, we get: The bride comes here. The rain came down. The neighborhood goes there. The sun comes here.
When we set these phrases right, they often sound … wrong.
So how did these phrases end up backwards, so to speak, and why does this unusual word order give them a different feel from their more normally-phrased counterparts?
The answer is buried in a far corner in the history of the English language.
Even though we still call it “English,” Old English was spoken so long ago that it barely resembles the English we speak today. One major difference between Modern English and Old English is that Old English had a much more flexible word order. This is partly because Old English nouns changed form depending on their role in the sentence. Those changes gave listeners clues about who was doing what to whom, separately from the word order of those words in a sentence.
By contrast, Modern English relies much more heavily on word order to convey who does what to whom. In the sentence “The man made a fire,” we know “the man” is the subject because it comes before the verb, and “a fire” is the object because it comes after it. Switch them around — “A fire made the man” — and meaning changes completely.
In spite of this flexibility, Old English did have some regular patterns for arranging words though. One important pattern was that verbs tended to come second. To put it another way, when something other than the subject came first in a sentence, the verb usually still followed it. This is easiest to see with an example.
In Old English, you could say something like, “The king came.” That’s the word order we’re familiar with today — the subject comes first, followed by the verb. But in Old English, you could also say, “Then came the king.” Here, “then” is the first word in the sentence, but notice that the verb “came” still comes right after it.
In both example sentences, the verb is in the second position. That’s what linguists call a verb-second, or V2, pattern. In Modern English, “Then came the king” sounds like an inversion because we expect the subject to come before the verb. But in Old English, this kind of word order was perfectly normal.
As centuries passed, the complex system of Old English noun endings faded away, and the “subject-first” word order that defines English today became standard. Yet the inverted construction we’ve been discussing survived as an exception to the new standard. Its survival might seem kind of random, but it actually serves a useful communicative purpose.
For example, phrases like “here comes the bride,” “there stood a house,” and “down came the rain” all put a direction or location at the beginning of the sentence. That gives them an announcement-like quality –– here is where something is happened, there is where something exists.
By putting the location or direction first, we establish the setting, and then introduce the person or thing that appears. The effect is almost cinematic. Rather than simply describing what happened, we're given the sense of watching something unfold in real time. This construction gives the sentence a sense of action or urgency, something linguists describe as a “presentational function.”
As it turns out, this inverted construction isn't limited to fixed phrases. We can also use it to create completely new sentences, like:
These sentences sound totally natural, and you probably use similar constructions all the time without realizing it. But there is one thing that doesn’t work with this construction: pronouns.
Try substituting "he," "she," or "it" into the sentences we just considered, and suddenly, they sound off:
These might work for poetry or quirky wordplay, but you’d be hard-pressed to hear versions like these in everyday speech.
Why?
As we’ve already seen, this construction is for introducing or announcing something. Pronouns, by contrast, tend to refer to something that has already been introduced.
The difference between “Here comes John” and “Here he comes” is subtle but important. “Here comes John” announces John's arrival. “Here he comes” assumes we already know who John is; our attention is simply being drawn to him as he arrives.
This construction is an exception to the usual rules of English word order, but as we can see, even exceptions have rules! This particular pattern might be a holdover from Old English, but incredibly, English speakers today have an intuitive sense of which words can participate in this pattern and which ones can’t.
Of course, most of us navigate these rules without consciously knowing what they are, why they exist, or where they came from. When we hear, “Here comes John,” we just think, “Yup, that sounds right,” while “Here comes he” immediately strikes us as wrong.
This little quirk of English is a testament to two important points. First, there’s an enormous amount of “implicit” grammar we never learn in a classroom but somehow master anyway. And second, exceptions in language usually aren’t random. There’s often a reason why our language works the way it does. If we look closely at language and its history, even the most obscure and seemingly trivial exceptions to the rules often have a story behind them.
That segment was written by Ray Belli, a longtime podcaster, musician, and language writer. You can find him at WordsforGranted.libsyn.com, and we’ll link that in the show notes.
References
Birner, Betty J. “Information Status and Word Order: An Analysis of English Inversion.” Language 70 (1994).
Birner, Betty J., and Gregory L. Ward. Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998.
Duffley, Patrick. “The Cognitive Structure of Full-Verb Inversion and Existential Structures in English.” Cognitive Semantics 4, no. 2 (2018): 184–229. https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-00402002.
Hundt, Marianne. “(Non-)Canonical Word Order in the History of English.” In Non-Canonical English Syntax: Concepts, Methods, and Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/noncanonical-english-syntax/introduction-trying-to-hit-a-moving-target/1E2787828491E436753CDBD21DD99810
by Mignon Fogarty
Next, I have a quick update about Zipf's law, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. That’s the pattern where the most common word appears about twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, and so on. You may remember that I said researchers had found that the sounds whales and maybe dolphins make follow Zipf's law. Well, I just saw that researchers might have found that birdsongs follow Zipf's law too! The team, led by Tucker Gilman at the University of Manchester, looked at recordings of about 560 birds in 11 different populations that included 7 different species. The effect wasn't as strong as what people find in human written language and only appeared when they looked across all 11 populations together, but the researchers say the results are consistent with Zipf's law in birdsong, and they want to study more bird populations to confirm it.
Finally, I have a familect story from Krista Hannah.
Hi Grammar Girl, my name's Krista Hannah Thompson, I'm in Ontario, Canada, and I have a familect that's accidentally spanned two generations.
So, when I was a kid, I had two younger brothers, and one of them — and I can't remember which — started calling spaghetti "pasgetti," and because it was cute, my parents started saying it too, and then we all did, and it kind of became the family word for spaghetti. And I hadn't thought about it in years and years and years.
Well, when my now eldest child, who's 12, was a very little girl, she started calling it "pasgetti" instead of spaghetti, and I had this flashback to my own childhood, and I thought, oh my goodness, this is happening again, completely independently, and it's the same switch, moving that "s" from "spa" to "pas."
So, that familect accidentally spanned two generations, and I suspect it's just with the sound being moved from "spa" to "pas." I'm suspecting that's probably a pretty common familect.
Thanks, bye!
Thanks, Krista Hannah. How fun, and you're right that people, and especially kids, switch sounds in words like that a lot. Linguists call it metathesis, and it's how we got the words "bird" and "horse," which were originally "brid" and "hros."
And if anyone wants to hear more, I covered it back in episode 973 when I was writing about why people say "nucular" instead of nuclear.
Thanks so much for the call!
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoopes; Morgan Christianson; Maram Elnagheeb; Steven Schapansky; Holly Hutchings; Dan Feierabend; and Rebekah Sebastian, who has five tattoos and is ready for her sixth.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
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