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Is it grammatical to say:

So happy I am today!

instead of

I am so happy today!

F.E.
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Ravi OpenSource
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    It is legal to say it. You will not be arrested, or even fined. However, it's ungrammatical, if that matters. – John Lawler May 20 '15 at 13:43
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    @JohnLawler what about calling John Lawyer? – Yohann V. May 20 '15 at 13:44
  • Many people do, when they've seen my name. You did ask, you know. – John Lawler May 20 '15 at 13:45
  • @John: Dumb question, maybe, but what exactly do you mean by "ungrammatical"? A common translation of Aristophanes' The Birds has So sorrowful am I for you, who anciently were kings. I realise it's a poetic/dated construction, so it's certainly not idiomatic, conversational, but does that in itself mean it's not even grammatical? – FumbleFingers May 20 '15 at 15:34
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    Note it's .. am I for you, not .. I am for you. I.e, subject-auxiliary inversion has occurred because of the fronting of the predicate. That's the old rule. Now we only do that for negative adverb fronting Never have I seen X but not *Frequently have I seen X. As for grammaticality, it's complex, but the main constraint is that it has to occur frequently in the speech of natives, and it has to be rule-governed (and not a speech error, which are common). As Pullum puts it, competence is what you expect, performance is what you get. – John Lawler May 20 '15 at 15:44
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    only if you are Yoda – isJustMe May 20 '15 at 16:05
  • @isJustMe: Is that "just" as in justice or "just" as in "little ole"? – TimR May 20 '15 at 17:15
  • @John Lawler: "Rarely have I...." still works though. Is that because it's perceived to mean "not often" I wonder. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=(rarely+have+i)&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Crarely%20have%20i%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BRarely%20have%20I%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Brarely%20have%20I%3B%2Cc0 – TimR May 20 '15 at 17:26
  • @TRomano But the OP's sentence isn't "so happy am I" it's "so happy I am today" – Araucaria - Not here any more. May 20 '15 at 18:00
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    @Araucaria: My question with was in connection with John's comment: Now we only do that for negative adverb fronting Never have I seen X but not *Frequently have I seen X. – TimR May 20 '15 at 18:05
  • @TRomano Ah, I see, sorry. Btw, yes. rarely has a negatrive meaning in English and therefore is considered a negative polarity item. You can do a little test for this. If we have a tag in a tag question the tag is negative if the main clause is positive and vice verse, so we get "He's often been there, hasn't he?", but "*He's rarely been there has he?**". The last tag is positive because rarely*'s negative meaning makes the main clause negative :-) – Araucaria - Not here any more. May 20 '15 at 18:11
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    OK, that last edit went a little too far into the "don't significantly edit a question after it's been answered" realm... – Catija May 20 '15 at 18:36
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    @pazzo I don't want to get in some sort of edit war... it's one thing to add that part to an answer to add more to the topic but it's completely another thing to add it to the question... – Catija May 20 '15 at 18:48
  • Rarely is negative; it's a Negative Trigger, not a Negative Polarity Item. Subject-auxiliary inversion after adverb-fronting is the NPI; rarely is the negative that licenses it; like never. Lists of both triggers and NPIs here. – John Lawler May 20 '15 at 18:52
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    @F.E. If you'd like to enlighten readers about the terminology and three alternatives, you might want to bother. Isn't that why you added them to the question? Writing an answer is a lot more work, though, and I can see how you might feel unmotivated if you think people aren't interested. (I gather that some are and some aren't.) – Ben Kovitz May 21 '15 at 08:19
  • So happy I am today is ungrammatical according to standard grammar, but it is comprehensible. The grammatically correct alternative is So happy am I today. –  May 21 '15 at 14:12

6 Answers6

4

  1. *So happy I am today!

  2. So happy am I today!

In the Original Poster's example, (1), the complement of the verb BE has been preposed. The normal phrase order would be:

  • I am so happy today!

It is perfectly grammatical to prepose the complement of the verb BE in this way. However, when we prepose phrases starting with the degree adverb so, this triggers obligatory subject-auxiliary inversion. In other words the subject of the sentence and the auxiliary verb change places:

  • *So surprised he was that he forgot to reply. (ungrammatical)
  • So surprised was he that he forgot to reply.

In order for the Original Poster's sentence to be grammatical we need to change the order of the subject and auxiliary verb BE, as in (2):

  • So happy am I today!

This would normally be considered a type of exclamation. The change of phrase order gives it a certain literary style. You would be very unlikely to hear it in normal conversation!

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Araucaria - Not here any more.
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    Fantastic. Clears my doubt. Well, so happy am I, to see this explanation!! –  May 20 '15 at 14:11
  • @RaviOpenSource Glad to be of service! Remember to come back and check for other answers later. They might have something useful to say too! :) – Araucaria - Not here any more. May 20 '15 at 14:13
  • I sure will. I do learn a lot from this site; always amazed at the promptness of the responses. –  May 20 '15 at 14:14
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    Whoa! When I saw this thread, I was going to ding you about it, as it seemed to be about what we had recently discussed. The OP's example seems exclamation-y and I thought you would argue that it was acceptable! So me now puzzle! So puzzled I am! I'm going to get me-self up and maybe start the coffee early, and then re-look at this all stuff. Are you sure you don't want to be supporting the acceptability of the OP's example? Hmm . . . – F.E. May 20 '15 at 17:25
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    @F.E. To be honest, it sounds fine to me, even though lots of people are suggesting that it's ungrammatical... –  May 20 '15 at 17:30
  • @snailboat, F.E. Do you need a pause / separate intonational phrase for "I am" after "I am" when you say that? – Araucaria - Not here any more. May 20 '15 at 18:04
  • @F.E. Not sure it has so much of a different interpretation, but it's both an exclamative clause and an exclamation as opposed to a declarative clause and an exclamation! I'm a bit unsure whether I had to wait I don't know how long is a species of exclamative clause as well as being an exclamation (perhaps) ... – Araucaria - Not here any more. May 20 '15 at 22:30
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"So happy am I, today!"- correct, puts emphasis on the state of happiness, rather than on "I am".

This may not be the way we speak all the time, though. "I am interested in your work" is what we normally say, instead of "Interested am I, in your work."

Sankarane
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The conventional way to say this is, "I am so happy today!"

English speakers occasionally say things like, "Happy am I" rather than "I am happy". But this is very rare and unusual. It could work in poetry or song lyrics, or perhaps if you are trying to emphasize "happy" over "I".

Jay
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So with all the arguments and brainstorming /brainsharing, I assume, "so happy I am..." is at least colloquially, if not formally apt—something that is in ratification of my wont, already!!

Ravi OpenSource
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  • If you want to use the expression in everyday language, then it seems the best option is to go with what is gramatical in everyday speech, which is So happy am I today. It sounds much more eloquent than the version you ask about. –  May 21 '15 at 23:54
  • It's not "colloquial", if by that you mean a kind of sloppiness or error that's tolerated in casual conversation, like this. The sentence has an expressiveness to it that's more appropriate to song or poetry than conversation. It just depends on whether you think such unusual rhetoric is appropriate to the situation. I just edited my answer to include a context where it's clearly called for. I'm sure some will still disagree, though—there can be no unanimity regarding unconventional word order. – Ben Kovitz May 22 '15 at 05:28
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Unconventional but grammatical

Yes, "So happy I am today" is grammatical. The word order is unconventional. The ordinary, prosaic word order would be "I am so happy today." The customary poetic inversion would have "am I": "So happy today am I", "So happy am I today", etc.

Because "So happy I am today" has unconventional word order, it creates unusual and strong emphasis. To a listener, the unexpected order is jarring at first. This forces the listener's mind to find a way make grammatical sense of the sentence, and that suggests that you must be emphasizing something different than the usual word order would emphasize. Usually unconventional word order puts the emphasis on the last word in the sentence, but in this sentence, I think the emphasis goes on "so happy". It appears that you are emphasizing your particular degree of happiness as unusual or remarkable.

The unusual word order might lead a listener to parse the sentence differently than you expect. The word "so" can mean "consequently" or "very" (and a few other things, too). At the beginning of a sentence, it usually means "consequently". So, a listener might understand your sentence to mean the same as "Consequently I am happy today," perhaps referring to a cause that you explained earlier, or perhaps leaving the cause mysterious. Of course, with the unconventional word order, that would be "Consequently, happy I am today."

Rhythm

When you say the unconventional sentence out loud, the word "am" needs to be drawn out longer than usual—longer than in "I am so happy today." In "So happy I am today", the word "am" should last as long as the syllable "-day". Without that, a listener may think that you misspoke, even though the sentence is grammatical. You can prevent the parsing described in the previous paragraph by drawing out "So" for the same amount of time as "am" and "-day".

In musical notes, the rhythm of "So happy I am today" would probably go something like this (not exactly):

♩ ❘ ♪ ♪ ♪ ❘♩ ♪ ❘ ♩

When you use unusual word order, rhythm becomes more important for maintaining comprehensibility.

On the differences of opinion

As you've seen in the other answers and comments, some people argue that "So happy I am today" is ungrammatical, on the basis of explicitly defined rules about exactly when and how inversion must happen in English. John Lawler said that to be grammatical, "it has to occur frequently in the speech of natives, and it has to be rule-governed." I think that's wrong on both counts. Poetic speech gets much of its expressiveness from the fact that it uses forms that do not occur frequently in speech, and I understand English grammar to work something like English common law: not by rules, but by precedents—by echoing and varying previous speech, bending and adjusting it to the unique concerns and pressures of each case, in ways that no finite set of rules could ever fully capture.

Here's an illustration of how contextual pressures can make your sentence more correct than the customary inversion:

So happy I am today!

And so happy I'll be tomorrow!

Are you watching my feet? So happ'ly they beat!

So lightly they step, these engines of pep!

I've permanently stamped out sorrow!

This verse draws upon other elements of the language, such as the fact that the contraction "I'll be" doesn't ordinarily get inverted, as well as rhythm and rhyme (and repetition), to make the non-inverted constructions sound normal. For example, "So lightly do they step" would correspond to "So happy am I", but "So lightly do they step" would be a grammatical error (or at least very awkward) in the sentence above, so it further reinforces "So happy I am".

But the verse illustrates an important grain of truth in the other side: "So happy I am today" does not occur in ordinary speech. It's poetic speech. It can easily sound ungrammatical if you don't support it with other cues, like prosody, juxtaposition with a parallel grammatical form (like "I'll be" above), and—especially—a situation or meaning that calls for unusual speech. Figuring out what those other cues need to be in order to establish grammaticality requires a lot of intuition, which can only be learned from long experience. And of course, different listeners have different levels of willingness to stretch conventional forms.

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Ben Kovitz
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    Hi Ben, You accurately reflect the exact shade of emotion I carry, when I say "So happy I am today!". I seem to have kicked quite a storm here with this topic, which I was perturbed with for quite some time–with a sense of guilt too, whether I was speaking a grammatically acceptable language. Deeply appreciate your explanation. – Ravi OpenSource May 20 '15 at 18:16
  • @pazzo Indeed, I wouldn't say "So happy am I today" or even "I am so happy today" in the quarterly financial report. I'll try to add something to clarify that the wording is poetic. Regarding "formally", do you mean strict rules as in chess or "formal logic"? – Ben Kovitz May 21 '15 at 12:36
  • Well I've clarified my stance. –  May 21 '15 at 14:14
  • +1 for the "differences of opinion" part. I think it's important to acknowledge that each of us has our own copy of English, never quite the same as anyone else's. Our concept of a Standard English is something of a convenient fiction. It's very useful, but we shouldn't be surprised when we find people have differing judgments on something people don't say very often. –  May 21 '15 at 19:58
  • @pazzo I didn't explain all of why it's grammatical (I'm not sure that would be of value to the OP), but I did explain what's wrong with evaluating the sentence's grammatically by checking it against explicit, formal rules. I'm curious to hear what you think, as you're also aware of English grammar's ability to bend far beyond ordinary usage (or at least you were a December ago). – Ben Kovitz May 21 '15 at 20:02
  • To me, as both a teacher and a leaner, the ability of a learner to communicate is in the forefront of my mind. Often this requires learning how to form a grammatically fit (correct) sentence in the target language. But even when I can't, but I can still communicate, well So happy I am when that occurs. But, when I both communicate and get it grammatically correct, then So happy am I when I achieve both. It is only after this that I would attempt to get creative and bend the rules. I can't bend them unless I know what they are. –  May 21 '15 at 23:49
  • @pazzo Indeed the sentence is likely to be produced as a result of an incorrect understanding of grammar in an ESL learner's mind, and should be discouraged among beginners before they're rock solid with the conventional forms. But that's different from "Is it grammatical?" "Me so happy!" clearly communicates but is ungrammatical. Inversion, on the other hand, is something that is conventional but in many cases not absolutely required, because English grammar works more by reinforcement of meaning by multiple cues than by strict rules (which is something an ESL learner should be taught). – Ben Kovitz May 22 '15 at 05:37
  • @pazzo BTW, "So happy am I" is also a major bending of the rules of ordinary speech, and closer to ungrammaticality. In ordinary speech, you say "I am so happy". In ordinary speech, "So happy am I" suggests that some sort of cause and some sort of consequence are coming, like "So happy am I that school is out, I danced a little jig." When the sentence ends unexpectedly, it sounds ungrammatical at first, forcing a re-parsing and reassignment of emphasis, just like "So happy I am"—but worse. Citing mandatory subject-auxiliary inversion here is a misapplication of the rule. – Ben Kovitz May 22 '15 at 14:31
  • So happy am I (today) doesn't sound the faintest bit ungrammatical to me. It is grammatical, and the only issue about it becomes the most natural contexts in which to use it. But I appreciate your viewpoint. –  May 22 '15 at 16:21
  • @pazzo I'm not saying that "So happy am I today" is ungrammatical. I'm saying that it suggests that there's more to come in the sentence (more than "So happy I am today" does, though the latter also suffers from that). Please have another look. I'm trying to explain why both inverted versions are grammatical, but the "mandatory" subject-auxiliary inversion rule doesn't have anything to do with it. – Ben Kovitz May 22 '15 at 17:06
  • Hmm. "Happy I am today" sounds to me much more clearly grammatical than any other unusual word ordering we've talked about recently. Can you tell me what leads you to say it's ungrammatical? Is it your ear or a rule that you've read? If the latter, can you tell me where you read it? That's mostly what I'm curious about. – Ben Kovitz May 22 '15 at 17:56
  • So happy I am today sounds jarring precisely because it is ungrammatical (per standard grammar) even if comprehensible. But So happy am I today doesn't sound the least bit jarring. It sounds melodious, which is probably why, even though grammatical, it's not a replacement for the mostly prosaic I am so happy today(!). I've little else to say on the subject. –  May 23 '15 at 01:09
  • I added so to the first line of above comment (I left it out by mistake earlier). I brought up what something sounds like only because you do. I really have nothing else to contribute concerning three sentences. –  May 23 '15 at 01:12
  • @pazzo If you wouldn't mind making one more contribution, what led you to your clarif^h^h^h^h^h^hchange of heart? Was it your ear, or was it an explicitly articulated rule? If the latter, where did you read it? – Ben Kovitz May 24 '15 at 22:45
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When Marty McFly returned back from the future and said "So happy I am today" it was reasonably grammatical. But in most situations it isn't.

gnasher729
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