236 Jennifer Herriman
(7) Negotiations are ongoing with Syria. (Bäckström 2004:88)
Det pågår förhandlingar med Syrien.
‘It goes on negotiations with Syria’
Thus Swedish tends to have short light Themes which postpone the chief infor-
mational content of the message to the Rheme, thereby following the information
principle more strictly than English. English, on the other hand, allows a greater
information load before the verb than Swedish.
In a comparison of writing by Swedish advanced learners of English and
British and American students, Boström Aronsson (2005: 88) found that the
Swedish learners used extraposition twice as frequently as the native speakers.
This may, then, be due to the transfer of a more frequent use of extraposition in
Swedish. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether this is the case. The design
of the study is described in Section 3, and the results are discussed in Sections 4,
5 and 6. Section 7, finally, discusses what conclusions can be drawn from these
findings. First, in the next section, I will take a closer look at the formal and func-
tional features of extraposition in English and Swedish, as these form the tertium
comparationis of this contrastive study, i.e. the common platform that we assume
to be shared in both Swedish and English against which the differences we find
may be stated (Krzeszowski 1990: 35).- Extraposition
Extrapositions are translationally equivalent in English and Swedish. In both lan-
guages they are clause complexes, consisting of a subordinate subject clause which
has been postponed to a position after its matrix predicate and replaced by a pro-
noun in subject position. The matrix predicate typically presents the speaker’s
attitude towards the informational content of the subordinate clause. The form
of language is functional with respect to human needs to communicate mean-
ings with each other. Seen from a Hallidayan perspective (Halliday & Matthiessen
2004: 29–31; Thompson 2004: 1–10), it is used to represent our experience of
the world around us and within us (experiential function), to interact with the
addressee (interpersonal function, and to organise these experiential and inter-
personal meanings into a message (textual function). The functions of the formal
features of extraposition are as follows (Herriman 2000b).
Firstly, as the matrix predicate represents the speaker’s attitude in the struc-
tural configuration of a clause, i.e. as SV, SVC or SVO, the experiential function
of extraposition is to represent the speaker’s attitude as a proposition consisting
of a process with participants and optional circumstances. As this is a separate