Urgent, Please help

[CoolSchool]

Hi everyone. I have to teach a lesson in the morning and I've been up all night trying to figure out how to present this grammar point as it is confusing for me still.

The sample sentences the text book gives are "Among them were Hyodo Masaharu and Shiba Tessei"
This is changed to " Hyodo Masaharu and Shiba Tessei were among them"

The second sentence is "Down fell the cedar tree" and "The cedar tree fell down"

There is no explanation given in the book, but it seems like they are taking the compliment and moving it to the beginning of the sentence. This is only okay in certain circumstances, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to describe this to my students without confusing them.

Any suggestions or help is reallly appreciated.

Thank you so much.

[Alan]

Most locative (i.e. place-related) adverbs and prepositional phrases can be 'fronted' (or 'preposed') in this way, with subsequent inversion of verb and subject, particularly where the verb is 'be' or one denoting motion such as 'go, come, fall', etc. , but normally only where the subject is a noun, not a pronoun.

Thus, we might say e.g.

Into the room came a beautiful young woman.

but not

*Into the room came she.

Please check the ESL Help Centre for further information.