A discourse-functional approach to theticity, subtypes of integrated relative clause and extraposition in English

Abstract The article is an attempt to develop Francis and Michaelis’ (F&M) (2014, 2017) account of ‘relative clause extraposition’ (RCE) in English, in terms of a more discourse-oriented dimension. On the basis of a corpus study, these authors select certain constituent types, enabling a comparison between configurations with and without RCE orderings. The result is a ‘prototypical’ sequence of constituent types that is claimed to predict whether RCE is felicitous or not. To further develop this analysis, the present article puts forward a three-way distinction, in terms of their degree of communicative dynamism, amongst presupposed (i.e. ‘grounded’) restrictive RCs, non-presupposed RRCs and ‘a-restrictive’ RCs (neither restrictive nor (strictly) non-restrictive). Only the non-grounded RCs result in a felicitous utterance when extraposed, since it is only such RCs that may realise a presentational function via RCE ordering. More generally, it is shown that the three main sentence-internal factors claimed by F&M to favour RCE derive from the thetic (‘all-new’) information-structure status of RCE-containing utterances: thus the key features highlighted are the expression-level reflection of the more basic Information Structure articulation involved in each case.