Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

242 Jennifer Herriman

Table 5. English correspondences to Swedish nonextrapositions

Swedish

nonextrapositions

English correspondences

Congruent Extrapositions Noncongruent Total

Att-clause 2 2 11 15

Infin. clause 16 5 26 47

Total 18 7 37 62

Table 6. Swedish correspondences to English nonextrapositions

English

nonextrapositions

Swedish correspondences

Congruent Extrapositions Noncongruent Total

That-clause 2 0 1 3

To-infin. clause 16 0 3 19

Total 18 0 4 22

The correspondence between nonextrapositions in the English and Swedish sam-

ples is much lower than the correspondence between extrapositions: there are only

two matches between nonextraposed that-clauses and sixteen matches between

nonextraposed inifinitival clauses, as in (15) and (16), respectively.

(15) Whether he was a Lutheran of the Norwegian established Church in which

he was brought up, or even whether he was a Christian in the accepted sense

of the word, may be open to doubt. But that he was a Theist is certain. (RH1)

Man kan fråga sig om han var lutheran i den norska statskyrkan som han växte

upp i, eller ens om han var kristen i ordets gängse bemärkelse. Men att han

var teist är säkert. (RH1T)

(16) Negentropy is large, of course, for improbable things like living organisms.

To describe the burgeoning life of our planet as improbable may seem odd. But

imagine that some cosmic chef takes all the ingredients of the present Earth

as atoms, mixes them, and lets them stand. (JL1T)

Negentropin är därför stor för odannolika saker som levande organismer.

Att beskriva det myllrande livet på vår planet som osannolikt kan kanske verka

egendomligt. Men tänk att en kosmisk köksmästare tar alla Jordens atomer,

blandar dem och låter dem stå. (JL1T)

A small number of the extrapositions in the English sample (two extraposed that-

clauses and five extraposed to-infinitival clauses) correspond to nonextraposi-

tions in the Swedish sample whereas, conversely, there are no instances of Swedish

extrapositions that correspond to nonextrapositions in the English sample. These

extrapositions are all translations from Swedish into English. Three of the Swedish

sources are clauses with initial adverbials followed by inversion of the verb and