The discursive status of extraposed object clauses

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the English object extraposition construction, which involves the anticipation of a complement clause by an expletive pronoun it in object position, as in he’ll appreciate it that you’ve taken the time to return his book. In the existing literature, the presence or absence of anticipatory it has been associated with interpretive differences in terms of the givenness and/or presupposition of the extraposed clause. From an empirical perspective, however, neither of these concepts can be applied to all instances of optionally extraposed object complements. As an alternative, I propose that object extraposition essentially has a discursive function: it involves the speaker’s emphatic assertion of the main clause predication in order to convey additional speaker-hearer related meanings.

Jaar van publicatie:2016

BOF-keylabel:ja

IOF-keylabel:ja

BOF-publication weight:1

CSS-citation score:1

Authors from:Higher Education

Toegankelijkheid:Closed