The extraposition of clausal subjects
in English and Swedish
Jennifer Herriman
University of GothenburgThis study compares the extraposition of subject clauses in two samples of
English and Swedish original texts and their translations from the English-
Swedish Parallel Corpus. It finds a more frequent usage of extrapositions in
the Swedish sample. This is due to formal, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic
differences between the two languages (e.g. the existence of a gerund -ing form
in English but not in Swedish, the V2 constraint in Swedish, and the greater
semantic scope and tolerance of new information in English subjects), all of
which make it possible for more information to be placed in preverbal position
in English than in Swedish. The study also finds that subject clauses are more
frequent in general in the Swedish sample, both when they are extraposed and
when they are retained in preverbal position. This appears to be due to a greater
tendency for process meanings to be nominalised in English.Keywords: extraposition, word order, information structure, cohesion,
translation- Introduction
English and Swedish follow similar principles for mapping the information of a
message onto their syntactic structure (Altenberg 1998: 117). Heavy, newsworthy
information tends to be placed late, in the part of the message which is generally
labelled the Rheme, and short, given information tends to be placed in initial
position, in what is usually labelled the Theme (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 64).^1
- Studies differ in where they draw the boundary between the Theme and the Rheme. In this
study, I will follow Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 81) and draw the boundary after the first
experiential element, e.g. after But on Friday / Men på fredag in But on Friday we went to Paris /
Men på fredag åkte vi till Paris ‘But on Friday went we to Paris’ and in extrapositions after it /
det in e.g. It is likely that she can come / Det är sannolikt att hon kan komma.