In colloquial speech, there are several narrative inversion constructions in which the clause-initial position remains empty. Two prototypical examples can be found in the following joke, taken from the internet.

The first sentence of the joke in (104a) is the prototypical opening of a joke, as is clear from the fact that it has been used as the title of a television program of ultra-short sketches; cf. Bennis (2007) and nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komt_een_man_bij_de_dokter. Such examples should be seen as expletive constructions, in which the expletive erthere has been omitted. This is clear from the fact that a simple Google search will reveal that both versions in (105a) often occur in a joking context. Example (105b) shows that the two constructions are similar in that they exhibit the definiteness effect: the subject cannot be a definite noun phrase. We conclude that we are dealing with a special kind of “topic drop” that affects the expletive erthere.

The continuation of the joke in (104b) provides another case of narrative inversion; cf. Den Besten (1983). Again, it does not seem impossible to consider cases like this as a shorter version of a more elaborate structure: it may involve the omission of an adverbial phrase that acts as a connective between the two sentences: toenthen, meteenimmediately, vervolgensnext, daarnaafter that, etc. It is often not quite fitting to replace the inverted V1-structure with a non-inverted V2-structure; this is illustrated in the (b)-sentences in (106), taken from Zwart (1997), where the dollar sing indicates that the primed example would not be a felicitous continuation of (106a). Note in passing that the pronoun meme in the (b)-examples is an ethical dative (and not a goal argument).

In this case, the V1-structure can again be analyzed as a case in which a main-clause initial element is deleted. Another quite natural alternative for (106a&b) would be the following: Afijn, ik naar die vent toe en daar begint-ie me toch een verhaal op te hangen. In this example, the main-clause initial position of the second conjunct is filled by the more or less semantically vacuous topic element daarthere. For completeness’ sake, we need to point out that Zwart (1997:220) claims that narrative inversion involves some empty operator, but we are not aware of any independently motivated arguments favoring this assumption over the omission analysis suggested above; we therefore leave this to future research. Regardless of the outcome of such research, it seems safe to conclude that narrative V1-constructions with inversion do not seem to pose insurmountable problems for the hypothesis that V1-orders are concealed V2-orders: we are dealing with a superficial phonetic phenomenon.