238 Jennifer Herriman
extraposition is also a means of maintaining the principles of given informa-
tion before new. However, extraposed subject clauses may also represent given
or inferrable information (Kaltenböck 2005: 132). These occur, in particular, in
spoken language when, for instance, their communicative function is to sum up
or paraphrase the immediately preceding topic and then to comment on it, in what
Kaltenböck (2005: 138) refers to as the Reaction mode.
In sum, extraposition postpones the main informational content of the mes-
sage to the Rheme and presents it from the perspective of the speaker’s evaluation.
This is made explicit, negotiable and, at the same time, objective.- Material and method
To compare the extraposition of subject clauses in English and Swedish, I have
examined two samples of original texts and their translations in the English-
Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) (Altenberg & Aijmer 2000). Each sample
comprises eight source texts, four each from the fiction and popular science
categories (a total of approximately 106,400 words in English and 98,700 words
in Swedish) and their translations (a total of approximately 113,200 words in
English and approximately 104,700 words in Swedish). (The texts and the codes
used in the examples quoted here are given in the list of references.) From now
on, the English original texts (EO) and the English translations (ET) will be
referred to as the English sample, and the Swedish original texts (SO) and the
Swedish translations (ST) will be referred to as the Swedish sample. For practi-
cal reasons, the investigation has been limited to that-clauses and to-infiniti-
val clauses in English and att-clauses (‘that’-clauses) and infinitival clauses in
Swedish, though it is possible for other clausal subjects to be extraposed, such
as wh-clauses (e.g. Then it dawned on Sheila who he was; Just nu är det osäkert
hur det hela slutar ‘Just now is it uncertain how the whole finishes’) and -ing
clauses (e.g. I know it isn’t always fun having to work in an embassy) (Herriman
2000a: 12). Using that and to as search words, I collected all the instances of
that-clauses and to-infinitival clauses functioning as subjects in the English
texts (both sources and translations), and using att as search word, I collected
all the instances of att-clauses and infinitival clauses functioning as subjects in
the Swedish texts (both sources and translations). A small number of clausal
subjects (eight in the Swedish sample and three in the English sample) were
discarded as they did not, because of syntactic constraints, have an extraposed
variant (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 1407), e.g. clausal subjects of identifying
clauses, such as (12).