Language desk
< July 27	<< Jun \| July \| Aug >>	July 29 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 28

Peace for our time sentence of Neville Chamberlain

"My good friends, this is the second time in our history there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour." I get the meaning, but don't understand this sentence grammatically and semantically. What is even the subject? --KnightMove (talk) 15:21, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As English is an analytic, rather than inflectional language, using a creative, flexible word order might be confusing, but I believe it would be the same structure-wise as "My good friends, this is the second time in our history that peace with honour has come back from Germany to Downing Street." 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:26, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

See Dummy pronoun § Existential there. Another example is Adenauer's "There has arrived a moment pregnant with fate", probably a translation of a German sentence (Es ist ein schicksalsträchtiger Moment gekommen). The subject ("a moment pregnant with fate") in the usual SVO word order ("a moment pregnant with fate has arrived") is replaced by "there" while the original subject is moved to the end. In such constructions, the verb is intransitive, so there is no O in the SVO. Yet another example: "There has returned a certain pride in ourselves as soldiers and in our units".^[1] ‑‑Lambiam 05:53, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you both. Indeed the additional object in between "from Germany to Downing Street" makes it particularly hard to recognonise the peace as the subject. --KnightMove (talk) 06:50, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Either way, he got it wrong. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:11, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]