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Suppose I have the following sentence:

You can't put your phone anywhere in the room.

I want to rewrite the sentence starting with "Nowhere in the room" (to give more importance to it). However as a non-English speaker, I'm not sure what is the grammatically correct way of continuing the sentence.

1) Nowhere in the room you can put your phone
2) Nowhere in the room can you put your phone
3) Nowhere in the room your phone can be put
4) Nowhere in the room can your phone be put

Sentences 1 and 2 use an active voice, giving more importance to "you" than to "the phone" (maybe you don't have permission to do it but others do)

Sentences 3 and 4 use a passive voice, giving more importance to the phone being the problem rather than you.

Which of the 4 options are correct and which ones are incorrect? I'm not sure what the order of the pronoun and the verb should be after the complement of place.

Elerium115
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    The closest idiomatic version for me is There's nowhere you can put your phone.... If you must start with Nowhere then Nowhere in the room can you put your phone! (only) just about works as an exasperated exclamation. – Dan Mar 12 '24 at 12:25
  • Does this answer your question? Subject-auxiliary inversions not associated with questions 'Subject-Auxiliary Inversion with Adverb[ial]-Fronting is simply a Negative Polarity Item (NPI). ... Subject-Auxiliary Inversion is OK with a fronted adverb that is a Negative Trigger. E.g, ever and frequently are not negative, but never is; hence:

    Ever have I seen such a thing. / Frequently have I seen such a thing. / Never have I seen such a thing. >> 1 and 3 are not grammatical...

     – Edwin Ashworth Mar 12 '24 at 12:29
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    as 'nowhere' triggers inversion. 2 is grammatical but highly formal / literary in style. And the sentence is too mundane to license this. 4 is bordering on the outlandish even if it is grammatical. [The quote from the previous thread is by the sadly missed John Lawler.] – Edwin Ashworth Mar 12 '24 at 12:29
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    Nowhere in the room is more like an adverbial phrase than the object of the verb "put". Although adverbials can often be moved to the front of a sentence. So it's not a question of converting from active to passive. "You can put it nowhere" -> "It can be put nowhere" -> ?"Nowhere can it be put". Doesn't sound great, but signs often have slightly strange grammar. – Stuart F Mar 12 '24 at 12:31
  • @Elerium115 The usual English sign of this type is NO PHONES IN THIS ROOM! – Dan Mar 12 '24 at 12:41
  • and 3) are ungrammatical. 2) and 4) are OK. The negator "nowhere" triggers subject-auxiliary inversion, as in 2) and the rather unnatural 4).
    • – BillJ Mar 12 '24 at 14:35
  • @EdwinAshworth But "nowhere" is not an NPI. It's an absolute negator. – BillJ Mar 13 '24 at 07:55