’Rarely a week passes ~ ’ is grammatical without inversion?

Question

“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.

Answer 1

Both "hardly" and "scarcely" seem to directly modify "a week", and they don't seem to want the inversion with "does". This is despite being classed as adverbs. They seem similar to "almost" in that respect.

I think the "does" inversion is needed with "rarely" and "seldom", in order to connect them to the verb "passes", skipping over the noun "a week".

"Rarely a week passes" and "seldom a week passes" just sound wrong to me.

Answer 2

Syntactically and semantically, all of rarely, scarcely, hardly, seldom are equivalent and interchangeable in OP's context, but idiomatically, only the first two are in common use...

...and so far as I'm concerned, the only slight difference between them is that some people might think scarcely is a bit "dated" or "literary". That's because although it's almost half as common as hardly in OP's exact context, scarcely is extremely rare compared to hardly overall.

Scarcely a day / week / etc. passes [without some event reoccurring] has become a "frozen form" idiomatic usage for some people. But you certainly don't need to learn and use it today, given that hardly became the more common choice over a century ago.

Answer 3

CGEL (page 820) noted that it is possible, for many speakers, to use rarely in front position without triggering subject-auxiliary inversion. It is noticeable that the example in CGEL has a comma after rarely (as opposed to "Rarely does the possum emerge before the dusk").

"Rarely, the possum emerges before dusk."

I found another example in https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2021-11-03/debates/2BE07441-903C-4482-A5F0-B80E33602440/CatchmentBasedApproach%E2%80%99SChalkStreamRestorationStrategy2021?highlight=rarely#contribution-88447094-60AE-4FFB-8277-39A74BC49B62

"Very rarely, you might be lucky to witness the bright blue of a kingfisher coming out of the banks."

With the comma, it seems it's modifying the entire clause.

But with your sentence, I prefer the subject-auxiliary inversion.