Extraposition in English and Swedish 253
In sum, though extrapositions are translationally equivalent in English and
Swedish, they are often used in Swedish when English may have a simple clause.
This is due to a number of differences between the languages. These are formal,
e.g. the absence of a Swedish equivalent of the English gerund -ing form; syntactic,
e.g. different word order constraints in English and Swedish, semantic, e.g. the
preference for adverbial functions for inanimate semantic roles in Swedish, and
pragmatic, e.g. a tendency for Swedish to follow the information principle more
strictly than English.
- Noncongruent correspondences to nonextrapositions
Tables 9 and 10 give the noncongruent correspondences of subject nonextraposi-
tions in English and Swedish, respectively.^9
Table 9. English noncongruent correspondences of nonextrapositions
in the Swedish sample
Swedish
nonextrapositions
English noncongruent correspondences
Nominals Free Total
Att-clauses 10 1 11
Infinitive clauses 22 4 26
Total 32 5 37
Table 10. Swedish noncongruent correspondences of nonextrapositions
in the English sample^10
English
nonextrapositions
Swedish noncongruent correspondences
Nominals Free^10 Total
That-clauses 1 0 1
To-infinitive clauses 0 3 3
Total 1 3 4
The chief type of noncongruent English correspondences of Swedish subject non-
extrapositions is a simple clause with a nominal that corresponds to the content
of the subject clause, as in (44)–(47).
- Table 9 excludes the seven Swedish nonextrapositions that correspond to English extraposi-
tions, which are exemplified by (17)–(19) above. - This includes one Swedish extraposition which has not been translated at all.