Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-ktprf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-07T12:56:34.722Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Extraposition is disappearing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Joel C. Wallenberg
Joel C. Wallenberg*
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
*
[joel.wallenberg@ncl.ac.uk]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study describes a change in which relative clause extraposition is in the process of being lost in English, Icelandic, French, and Portuguese. This current change in progress has never been observed before, probably because it is so slow that it is undetectable without the aid of multiple diachronic parsed corpora (treebanks) with time depths of over 500 years each. Building on insights from Kiparsky (1995), the study shows that the change may date as far back as the innovation of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Romance relative clauses, as these varieties differentiated from Proto-Indo-European. It also shows that the unusually slow speed of the change is due to partial specialization of the construction along the dimension of prosodic weight, following the argument made at greater length in Fruehwald & Wallenberg 2016. Finally, the change is shown to have important consequences for the syntax of extraposition, supporting the adjunction analysis of Culi- cover and Rochemont (1990). The article also discusses the implications of Sauerland's (2003) analysis of English relative clauses, and while modern English data supports his analysis, the diachronic extraposition data is not yet fine-grained enough to bear on the ‘raising’ analysis of relatives in general. This is identified as an important question for further research on this change.

Keywords

syntaxlanguage changeIndo-Europeanevolutionary dynamicstreebanks

Information

Type
Historical Syntax
Information
Language , Volume 92 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. e237 - e256
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Aronoff, Mark. 1976. Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Mark. 2008. The macroparameter in a microparametric world. The limits of syntactic variation, ed. by Biberauer, Theresa, 351–74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Baltin, Mark R. 2006. Extraposition. The Blackwell companion to syntax, vol. 2, ed. by Everaert, Martin and Riemsdijk, Henk van, 237–71. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9780470996591.ch25.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Martin; and Bolker, Ben. 2011. lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. Online: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4.Google Scholar
Biberauer, Theresa. 2003. Verb second (V2) in Afrikaans: A minimalist investigation of word order variation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge dissertation.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, and Hayes, Bruce. 2001. Empirical tests of the gradual learning algorithm. Linguistic Inquiry 32. 45–86. DOI: 10.1162/002438901554586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul, and Pater, Joe. 2008. Convergence properties of a gradual learning algorithm for harmonic grammar. Technical report. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University. Online: http://roa.rutgers.edu/artide/view/1000.Google Scholar
Borer, Hagit. 1984. Parametric syntax: Case studies in Semitic and Romance languages. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, Greg N. 1977. Amount relatives. Language 53. 520–42. DOI: 10.2307/413175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Eve V. 1987. The principle of contrast: A constraint on language acquisition. Mechanisms of language acquisition: The 20th annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, ed. by MacWhinney, Brian, 1–34. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Clark, Eve V. 1990. On the pragmatics of contrast. Journal of Child Language 17. 417–31. DOI: 10.1017/S0305000900013842.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Culicover, Peter W., and Rochemont, Michael S.. 1990. Extraposition and the complement principle. Linguistic Inquiry 21. 23–47. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4178658.Google Scholar
Fruehwald, Josef, and Wallenberg, Joel C.. 2013. Optionality is stable variation is competing grammars. Paper presented at the 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, Formal Ways of Analyzing Variation (FWAV) workshop.Google Scholar
Fruehwald, Josef, and Wallenberg, Joel C.. 2016. Optionality is stable variation is competing grammars. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, and Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University, ms.Google Scholar
Galves, Charlotte, and Faria, Pablo. 2010. The Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese. Campinas: Department of Linguistics, University of Campinas (UNICAMP). Online: http://www.tycho.iel.unicamp.br/~tycho/.Google Scholar
Haudry, Jean. 1973. Parataxe, hypotaxe et corrélation dans la phrase latine. Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris 68. 147–86.Google Scholar
Kayne, Richard S. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul V. 1995. Indo-European origins of Germanic syntax. Clause structure and language change (Oxford studies in comparative syntax), ed. by Battye, Adrian and Roberts, Ian G., 140–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1. 199–244. DOI: 10.1017/S0954394500000168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S. 1994. Morphosyntactic variation. Chicago Linguistic Society (Parasession on variation in linguistic theory) 30.2.180–201.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Santorini, Beatrice; and Diertani, Ariel. 2005. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. Philadelphia: Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. Online: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche/ppche-release-2016/PPCEmE-RElEaSE-3. (1.8 million words.).Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Santorini, Beatrice; and Diertani, Ariel. 2010. Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. Philadelphia: Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. Online: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche/ppche-release-2016/PPCMBE2-RELEASE-1. (~950,000 words.).Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, and Taylor, Ann. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. 2nd edn. CD-ROM. Philadelphia: Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. Online: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche/ppche-release-2016/PPCME2-RELEASE-4. (1.3 million words.).Google Scholar
Martineau, France, Hirschbühler, Paul, Kroch, Anthony; and Morin, Yves Charles. 2010. Modéliser le changement: Les voies du français. Ottawa: University of Ottawa. Online: http://www.voies.uottawa.ca. (~994,000 words.).Google Scholar
Pater, Joe. 2008. Gradual learning and convergence. Linguistic Inquiry 39. 334–45. DOI: 10.1162/ling.2008.39.2.334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. 1991. Phrase structures in competition: Variation and change in Old English word order. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2014. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Online: http://www.R-project.org.Google Scholar
Randall, Beth. 2000/2013. CorpusSearch 2: A tool for linguistics research. Online: http://sourceforge.net/projects/corpussearch/.Google Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. 1989. The generalization of the verb-second constraint in the history of Yiddish. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. 1992. Variation and change in Yiddish subordinate clause word order. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 10. 595–640. DOI: 10.1007/BF00133331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. 1993. The rate of phrase structure change in the history of Yiddish. Language Variation and Change 5. 257–83. DOI: 10.1017/S0954394500001502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauerland, Uli. 2003. Unpronounced heads in relative clauses. The interfaces: Deriving and interpreting omitted structures (Linguistik aktuell 61), ed. by Schwabe, Kerstin and Winkler, Susanne, 205–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/la.61.10sau.Google Scholar
Taylor, Ann. 1994. Variation in past tense formation in the history of English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 1. 143–59. Online: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol1/iss1/10.Google Scholar
Taylor, Ann, Nurmi, Arja, Warner, Anthony, Pintzuk, Susan; and Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. York: University of York, and Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Online: http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/PCEEC-manual/.Google Scholar
Taylor, Ann, Warner, Anthony, Pintzuk, Susan; and Beths, Frank. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. York: University of York. Online: http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YcoeHome1.htm.Google Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C. 2009. Antisymmetry and the conservation of c-command: Scrambling and phrase structure in synchronic and diachronic perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C. 2013. A unified theory of stable variation, syntactic optionality, and syntactic change. Paper presented at the 15th meeting of the Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference, University of Ottawa.Google Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C. 2015. Antisymmetry and heavy NP shift across Germanic. Syntax over time: Lexical, morphological and information-structural interactions, ed. by Biberauer, Theresa and Walkden, George, 336–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199687923.001.0001.Google Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C., Ingason, Anton K., Sigurđsson;, Einar F. and Rögn-valdsson, Eiríkur. 2011. Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC). Version 0.9. Online: http://www.linguist.is/icelandic_treebank. (1 million words.).Google Scholar
Yang, Charles. 2000. Internal and external forces in language change. Language Variation and Change 12. 231–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar