16.1543, Review: Syntax/Corpus Ling: Kaltenböck (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1543. Sat May 14 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1543, Review: Syntax/Corpus Ling: Kaltenböck (2004)

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1)
Date: 13-May-2005
From: Marcus Callies < callies at staff.uni-marburg.de >
Subject: It-extraposition and Non-extraposition in English 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 14 May 2005 22:26:17
From: Marcus Callies < callies at staff.uni-marburg.de >
Subject: It-extraposition and Non-extraposition in English 
 

AUTHOR: Kaltenböck, Gunther
TITLE: It-extraposition and Non-extraposition in English
SUBTITLE: A study of syntax in spoken and written texts
SERIES: Austrian Studies in English, Vol 90
PUBLISHER: Wilhelm Braumüller
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-369.html


Marcus Callies, Department of English, Philipps-Universität Marburg, 
Germany

OVERVIEW

The present book offers a corpus-based description of the formal syntactic 
and discourse-functional characteristics of it- and non-extraposition in 
contemporary British English on the basis of material taken from the 
British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). Its aim 
is to provide "a detailed account of the communicative properties of it-
extraposition and non-extraposition"(p.2) by means of both a quantitative 
statistical and close qualitative textlinguistic analysis.

Chapter 1 consists of the introduction, which outlines the scope and 
structure of the book, advocates the corpus-linguistic approach of the 
investigation, and sketches the make-up and characteristics of the 
database. Chapter 2 summarizes previous descriptive-functional, 
transformational and corpus-based research on extraposition, while chapter 
3 provides the necessary terminological and conceptual framework, 
delimiting it-extraposition from related constructions (right-dislocation, 
it-clefting, tough-movement) and non-extraposition. Chapter 4 outlines the 
formal characteristics of both object- and subject-it-extraposition (and 
non-extraposition) and discusses the various subtypes of finite (that- and 
wh-clause) and non-finite subordinate clauses (to-, for/to?infinitives 
and -ing-clause) that typically occur. Kaltenböck also pays attention to 
frequent combination patterns with different types of syntactic and 
semantic categories of the matrix predicates.

Chapter 5 discusses the discourse-functional properties of it- and non-
extraposition. In finding explanations for the question what determines 
the choice of either structural variant in texts, Kaltenböck draws on the 
concepts of information status (given and new information), thematic 
structure and syntactic weight. Using a slightly modified version of 
Prince's (1981, 1992) taxonomy of assumed familiarity and her distinction 
between discourse-old/discourse-new information and hearer-old/hearer-new 
information, he distinguishes between two basic informational types of it- 
and non-extraposition, whose formal and functional properties are further 
analyzed and discussed in the subsequent sections.

Chapter 6 discusses syntactic, semantic, and register factors that 
influence the choice of non-extraposition. Chapter 7 consists of a brief 
summary and conclusion. The volume is rounded off by a bibliography and a 
subject index.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The book presents an in-depth descriptive analysis of it- and non-
extraposition in a wide range of different text types, offering extensive 
quantitative data. Its focus being a discourse-functional description and 
explanation of the occurrence of the two structural variants, the volume 
provides a detailed investigation of their respective communicative 
functions in spoken and written texts, using a wealth of naturally-
occurring examples. Kaltenböck's study confirms and advances both the 
formal syntactic and discourse-functional characteristics of it- and non-
extraposition that have been identified in previous research. Thus, he 
shows that despite their close structural and semantic relationship, the 
two variants behave quite differently and are usually not exchangeable.

The investigation yields detailed statistical results for the occurrence 
of two variants according to the type of extraposed subject/object clause. 
These frequency counts show that object-extraposition can be considered a 
marginal phenomenon, since it is clearly outnumbered by subject-
extraposition (p.65). As for subject-extraposition, it-extraposition 
predominates over non-extraposition in that-clauses, the for/to-
construction and the to-infinitive (cf. Erdmann 1988:330f. and 1990:135). 
Wh-clauses show no clear preference for either structural variant, because 
it- and non-extraposition are almost evenly distributed (p.125). By 
contrast, -ing-clauses strongly disprefer extraposition (p.152), which is 
in line with earlier findings that gerund-participles extrapose less 
readily and generally than content clauses and infinitivals. Extraposed -
ing-clauses appear to be uncommon except in informal speech, and are of 
dubious acceptance in comparison to extraposed infinitivals and the basic 
forms (Ward, Birner and Huddleston 2002:1407).

Thus, despite the fact that the variants with a clausal subject/object are 
sometimes claimed to be the syntactically more basic ones since they are 
simpler and exhibit canonical word order, it is in fact the extraposed 
variants which are much more frequent. Consequently, as Kaltenböck argues -
drawing on Givóns (1995) criteria for markedness - they should be 
considered as the statistically unmarked counterparts (cf. also Mair 
1990:29; Biber et al. 1999:676,725), because they reflect the general 
preference for light subjects in English (Mair 1990:40).

As for spoken and written English, the results demonstrate that while it-
extraposition is clearly preferred over non-extraposition in both modes 
(90.2% in spoken, 87.5% in written English), non-extraposition is more 
likely to occur in writing, for the written subcorpus contains almost 
twice as many such instances as the spoken part (79 vs. 138 instances). 
Regarding the different types of non-extraposed clauses, Kaltenböck 
observes that only non-extraposed wh-clauses are almost equally 
distributed in both modes (48.8% in the spoken vs. 51.2% in the spoken 
part), whereas with all other types he finds that their non-extraposed 
variants predominate in writing (70.6% for to-infinitivals, 62.5% for -ing-
clauses and even 100% for that-clauses).

Ward, Birner and Huddleston (2002:1403-1408) have demonstrated that the 
(in-)felicity of non-extraposed clauses is best explained in terms of 
three interacting factors: context, syntactic weight and processability, 
none of which alone can explain the preference/occurrence of one or the 
other construction. Similarly, Biber et al. (1999:676ff.,724ff.; see also 
Mair 1990:32-40 for a similar account) have argued that four grammatical 
and discourse factors influence the preference for the non-extraposed over 
the extraposed variant: register, information structure, grammatical 
complexity, and topic and personal style. Kaltenböck's study confirms 
these assumptions that it is in fact a conspiracy of several formal 
syntactic and discourse-functional factors that determine the choice among 
it- or non-extraposition.

As for the information status of either variant, the author distinguishes 
between two basic informational types of it-extraposition and non-
extraposition, respectively: for it-extraposition, there is type I which 
contains an extraposed clause with given, contextually retrievable 
information (either directly or via inferences), and type II, whose 
extraposed clause consists of new, brand-new or new-anchored information 
(p.181). Similarly, non-extraposition occurs with two types of clausal 
subjects: type I contains given, contextually retrievable information, and 
type II consists of new information (p.251). Kaltenböck's analysis clearly 
shows that non-extraposed subject clauses predominantly contain 
retrievable information (174 out of 217 instances, 80.2%), whereas 
extraposed clausal subjects largely consist of new information (1217 out 
of 1701 instances, 71.5%; p.181,251). Similar findings have been reported 
by Biber et al. (1999:677,725), Miller (2001), and Ward, Birner and 
Huddleston (2002:1404f.).

The author also demonstrates that syntactic weight plays a major role in 
the choice between it- and non-extraposition, which means that it is a 
construction that strongly interacts with the principle of end-weight in 
English. In it-extraposition, the extraposed clause is on average three 
times longer (measured in number of words) than its matrix clause, in both 
speaking and writing (p.206f.). By contrast, in non-extraposition the 
matrix and the subordinate clause are much more balanced in terms of 
weight distribution. Kaltenböck's findings reveal that their average 
length is identical (p.263). However, there is a noticeable difference 
between the spoken and written mode: in writing, the clausal subject is in 
fact longer than the matrix clause. For explanation, Kaltenböck argues 
that processing factors are more immediately relevant in speaking than 
writing, and that the occurrence of unusually long subject clauses, which 
runs counter to the end-weight principle, is outweighed by the fact that 
they serve a specific communicative effect. The author concludes that 
weight distribution may only be of limited importance for the occurrence 
non-extraposition and can be overridden by other factors such as 
felicitous information distribution (given vs. new) and more specific 
communicative functions (p.265). This is an interesting finding in view of 
the fact that to explain and predict the rare occurrence of heavy clausal 
subjects, previous accounts have predominantly drawn on weight 
distribution and processing factors, both of which are likely to 
facilitate comprehension by reducing and simplifying unnecessarily complex 
and informationally packed subjects (Erdmann 1988:337f.; Ward, Birner and 
Huddleston 2002:1403,1405).

In sum, this is an impressive and very detailed study with a large amount 
of very valuable data from a researcher who has already published on this 
syntactic phenomenon (Kaltenböck 2000, 2003). His study convincingly 
demonstrates that extraposition is a prime example for the interaction of 
the structural and discourse-pragmatic dimensions of information 
structure: sentence position, information status, and syntactic weight. It 
allows for an information-structural organization where both structural 
and textual requirements are fulfilled.

REFERENCES

Biber, Douglas et al., eds. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written 
English. Harlow: Longman.

Erdmann, Peter (1988) "On the Principle of 'Weight' in English", in Duncan-
Rose, Caroline and Theo Vennemann (eds.), On Language: Rhetorica, 
Phonologica, Syntactica. Festschrift for Robert P. Stockwell from His 
Friends & Colleagues. London: Routledge, 325-339.

Erdmann, Peter (1990) Discourse and Grammar: Focusing and Defocusing in 
English. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Givón, Talmy (1995) Functionalism and Grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Kaltenböck, Gunther (2000) "It-Extraposition and Non-Extraposition in 
English Discourse", in Mair, Christian and Marianne Hundt (eds.) Corpus 
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Papers from the Twentieth International 
Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 
20), Freiburg im Breisgau 1999. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 157-175.

Kaltenböck, Gunther (2003) "On the Syntactic and Semantic Status of 
Anticipatory It", English Language and Linguistics 7:2, 235-255.

Mair, Christian (1990) Infinitival Complement Clauses in English. A Study 
of Syntax in Discourse. Cambridge: CUP.

Miller, Philip H. (2001) "Discourse Constraints on (Non)Extraposition from 
Subject in English", Linguistics 39:4, 683-701.

Prince, Ellen F. (1981) "Toward a taxonomy of given/new information", in 
Cole, Peter (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, New York: Academic Press, 223-255.

Prince, Ellen F. (1992) "The ZPG letter: subjects, definiteness, and 
information-status", in Thompson, Sandra and W. Mann (eds.), Discourse 
Description: Diverse Analyses of a Fund Raising Text, Amsterdam: 
Benjamins, 295-325.

Ward, Gregory, Betty Birner and Rodney Huddleston (2002) "Information 
packaging", in Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.), The 
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge: CUP, 1363-1443. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marcus Callies is a junior lecturer and doctoral candidate in English 
Linguistics at Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. He teaches 
undergraduate courses in English Linguistics for teacher, BA and MA 
students, such as an introductory linguistics class and seminars on 
methods of linguistic description, phonology, morphology, semantics and 
syntax. His main research interests are contrastive linguistics (German-
English) and second language acquisition (with a focus on discourse-
functional aspects of learner language and interlanguage pragmatics).





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