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Extraposition and focus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Geoffrey J. Huck  and
Younghee Na
Younghee Na
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

Two curious phenomena which have to this point been treated separately in the literature are seen to be consequences of the same general interpretive mechanism. We propose that the theory of focus not only accounts for the ‘definiteness restriction’ with respect to material extraposed from NP, but also contributes crucially to an explanation for the variable acceptability of sentences containing extractions from extraposed PPs.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 51 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Some of the ideas on which this paper is based were first presented in talks we gave at the 1985 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the 1988 annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, and at workshops at the University of Toronto and SUNY-Buffalo; we are grateful to audiences at each for comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Mona Anderson, Mark Baltin, Elizabeth Cowper, John Goldsmith, Laurence Horn, Diane Massam, James McCawley, Keren Rice, John Richardson, Jerrold Sadock, Paul Schachter, Susan Schmerling, Gregory Ward, and Yael Ziv for useful discussion of issues raised in the paper, and would particularly like to thank Georgia Green, Charles Jones, and Michael Rochemont for detailed comments on an earlier version of it. This is of course not to say that any of the above would necessarily agree with what we say here. Research for this project was partially funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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