In the last decades, full inversion constructions in which the subject follows the entire verb phrase in a declarative clause, as in"Beside him was a table full of well-known books", have been the subject of extensive research from a functional perspective. This paper is a further contribution to this line of research and offers a corpus-based analysis of a particular type of full inversion, namely verb phrase inversion (for example,"Standing grim and alone was the hulking eyesore of the territorial prison"), in written English texts. In recent work on inversion, there does not seem to be complete agreement as regards the distribution of verb phrase inversion in fiction and non-fiction. On the one hand, works by Heidrum Dorgeloh, David Denison and Douglas Biber et al. suggest that the construction is more frequent in fiction. On the other, studies by Rong Chen and Rolf Kreyer argue the opposite. This study will cast light on the lack of consensus regarding the distribution of verb phrase inversion in written fictional and non-fictional texts. It will be shown that fiction and non-fiction do not differ strongly in the number of verb phrase inversions but rather in the different types of verb phrase inversion used and in the pragmatic function that these constructions serve in discourse.