The summer of 2012 was the warmest in 170 years, records show.
I encountered this sentence in a passage from the SAT Practice Test #1, being totally confused. Are there inversion and omission in this sentence? Is it just a strange form of this sentence:
Records show that the summer of 2012 was the warmest in 170 years.
No, this is an example neither of inversion nor of omission, but rather a perfectly straightforward example of fronting — which we sometimes call hyperbaton when we’re being all fancy and pretending to speak Greek. :)
The reason that it is not an example of inversion is because the subject (S) is still in its normal position before the verb (V). Switching the normal order of elements other than the subject with its verb or auxiliary we do not call inversion. Like your own question, the previous sentence is an example of fronting of one syntactic constituent to draw attention to it by placing it at the all-important front of the sentence.
English is allowed to front the predicate’s object (O) for stylistic reasons. The subject and its verb don’t move at all, though, so your SVO sentence simply becomes OSV without inversion.
Fronting happens much more often than people casually imagine. Here’s a simple example:
See also this answer and its treatment of the famous quote “Helms too they chose”, in which an English professor of great renown takes pointed exception to someone’s mistaken notion that this sort of thing counts as inversion. It doesn’t, although I suppose it’s always possible that the test-writer wasn’t an English professor and so got the terminology wrong.
