What is the difference between the two?
For example
- John came along.
- Along came John.
I don't understand the difference in usage and yet I come across too many sentences starting with 'Along came'
Could you please explain how to understand this.
Learn English – difference between “came along” and “along came”
inversionphrasal-verbsusageword-order
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What I want to express is that yesterday was my last day of work for this year and I have two weeks off work from today...
I think all three of your sentences pretty much say the same thing, but none of them quite say what you are trying to express.
Let's start with the sentence "I'm done with all my work this year." To me, that sounds as though you had a certain amount of work assigned to you for the year – maybe it was to build 400 widgets on an assembly line, or teach 15 training courses for a company, or keep three accounts balanced – and now all that work is done.
Having all your work done for the year is not quite the same thing as being done with work for the year.
I'm done with all my work for the year.
means there is no more work to be done. You inbox is empty, all your annual goals are met. If you walked into the office on Monday, you would have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs and stare at the walls. On the other hand:
I'm done working for the rest of the year.
means that you will be vacationing until January. Yes, there may still be emails to answer, reports to write, widgets to build, or sales quotas to be met, but all of that will have to wait until you get back to work.
The three sentences you gave all sound like they mean "There is no more work for me to do; I've finished everything, and I won't need to work again until January." They have a feel of, "Mission accomplished." I wouldn't expect a salesperson who works off of commissions to ever say that – even if quotas or goals have been met, there's always one more sale that could be made. However, a professor at a university might say that, once all the exams have been graded and the final grades have been turned in.
However, being done with work because you're scheduled to take two weeks off is a different matter. You realize there's always more work that could be done, you just won't be there to do it for two more weeks. If that's what your trying to communicate, I'd use one of these instead:
I'm all done working until next year.
I will be off work until next year. (or, more briefly, I'm off till next year).
I won't be coming in for the rest of the year.
Purely in terms of a request for information, there is no difference between the two—the answer will produce knowledge of the fact if the book has been read.
However, there is a difference in the emotional tenor and context between the two.
1. Have you read the book yet?
Generally speaking, this is more of a neutral expression that is simply asking for information.
A week later, Jim met Jane again. "Have you read the book yet?" he asked her.
2. Haven't you read the book yet?
This would more often be used in the context of surprise—or even a negative emotion like condescension—and would probably be rhetorical, in the sense that it's already known they haven't read it yet, so no response is actually required.
Two months later, Jane casually told Jim, "I still don't know if she dies in the end."
Jim replied in shock, "Haven't you read the book yet?"
Best Answer
Flexible word order
The difference is only that the words are in a different order. The grammar is the same. English actually has somewhat flexible word order, though we rarely exploit this in everyday conversation or prose.
The normal word order in English is SVO: subject-verb-object. That's the order of “John came along.” (There’s no object in that sentence; along is a particle, part of the phrasal verb “to come along”.)
But you can rearrange the words in many sentences and still make grammatical sense. One way to do that is to put the subject right after the verb, as in “Along came John.” There are other ways, too.
Famous examples
Here are some more examples, all of them famous:
= “I was able ere [before] I saw Elba.” (Meaning: I, Napoleon, had power before I was exiled to the island of Elba.)
= “…and he called for his three fiddlers.” The purpose of putting the adjective after the noun is to rhyme with an earlier line in the poem, which also has unusual word order.
= “We are three kings of Orient.” (That is, we are three kings from the East.)
= “To me, my mind is a kingdom.”
But why?
As you can see from the examples above, one use of unusual word order is to fit the constraints of poetry or word-play.
More often, unusual word order indicates that something is special or important, thus deserving the emphasis and attention that comes from using words in an unexpected way. When someone says “Along came John”, they mean that John came along unexpectedly, and this was a wonderful or perhaps terrible event.
For example (not famous; I'm just making this up now):
= “My son stood holding a baton in the orchestra pit.” A parent might use reversed word order to proudly describe seeing their son conducting an orchestra for the first time. The ordinary word order feels too dull and prosaic to describe such a momentous event.
This example illustrates another important use of unusual word ordering: to put the words in the order in which you want the listener to think about or imagine their meanings, when this is not the same as the normal order. The sentence above leads the listener to first imagine an orchestra pit, then some unidentified person holding a baton (therefore the conductor), and finally it is revealed that the conductor is the speaker’s son.
Often, a word gets strongest emphasis by appearing last, especially if it’s a noun. Mentioning the son last emphasizes the son, and mentioning John last emphasizes John.
Finally, unusual word ordering can sometimes create nice rhythms. The sentence about “my son” has a pleasing rhythm: it contains three “feet” of equal duration, each starting and ending with a stressed syllable: “orchestra pit”, “holding a baton”, “stood my son”. The prosaic version has a disorganized rhythm, like most prose. Ending on a stressed syllable often gives a sentence extra “punch”.
But how?
It takes “an ear for the language” to know when you can say words out of order and still be understood, and to predict what kind of poetic effect it will have. Part of the way you develop an ear for the language is by becoming familiar with well-known examples of unusual word order and poetic expression. They not only make you familiar with ways to “stretch” the language, they’re phrases that you can expect most English speakers to have heard, so your own unusual phrasings will echo the familiar ones in listener’s minds, helping them to follow the syntax.