“It used to be said that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold, but the expression is being increasingly tailored to the rise of China. *Rarely a week passes when some new phenomenon related to the growth of the eastern giant is not remarked upon*
. In the globalised economy, fads in the most populous nation can cause seismic shifts elsewhere.”
(1) Can I replace ‘rarely’ with ‘hardly’, ‘seldom', and ’scarcely’ without changing the meaning of the original sentence blocked? (I guess it’s possible)
(2) Is it plausible to say that the original sentence stands grammatical by itself and doesn’t need to be inverted, since the negative word ‘rarely’ is modifying not the verb ‘passes’ but the subject noun ‘a week’?
(3) When I invert the original sentence into
"Rarely does a week pass when some new phenomenon related to the growth of the eastern giant is not remarked upon.",
is it plausible to say there is no virtual difference in meaning except the focused part between the two - the subject noun ‘a week’ stressed in the former(uninverted one) and the verb ‘pass’ stressed in the latter respectively.
(4) Is the uninverted sentence informal style compared to the inverted one?
*source; BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6934709.stm
Would appreciate your responses.