Talk:Extraposition

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This page would benefit from some examples outside English (preferably outside IE).

Great. Please provide them. I can ensure that the additional examples are integrated well into the existing article. --Tjo3ya (talk) 21:36, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Quote: “This flexibility allows Catalan to use extraposition extensively, much more than French or Spanish. Thus, Catalan can have m'hi recomanaren ("they recommended me to him"), whereas in French one must say ils m'ont recommandé à lui, and Spanish me recomendaron a él. This allows the placement of almost any nominal term as a sentence topic, without having to use so often the passive voice (as in French or English), or identifying the direct object with a preposition (as in Spanish).”

It seems that extraposition is NOT "a mechanism of syntax that alters word order in such a manner that a relatively "heavy" constituent appears to the right of its canonical position" in languages other than English. Could someone (@Tjo3ya) integrate this into the article? –2dk (talk) 09:27, 28 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Extraposition likely fails in this case because with red hair cannot be construed as important information.

This seems oddly speculative. How can we verify this?

Shouldn't it at least be "according to <theory or author>, this fails because..."

Spike0xff (talk) 02:47, 25 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I remember reading somewhere that extraposed material should be informationally heavy, and that therefore it cannot occur if the extraposed material is informationally less heavy than some other part of the sentence. Unfortunately, I do not remember where I read that. I think it is basically accurate though. Note the use of "likely" in the preceding sentence. But what makes you think it is inaccurate? Do you have some other explanation for why extraposition fails in the example? Can you cite a source backing up your explanation? If we disagree about the point, we can simply remove the two example sentences.--Tjo3ya (talk) 04:34, 25 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This seems to have some nonsensical original research in it. In the section "Examples", we have

This is followed by unsourced claims, broad generalizations at lest one of which doesn't appear to stand up to any analysis (red color added by me for emphasis):

I've flagged this with {{Dubious}} because it's sourceless and defies reality. See the prior red hair example quoted above, which is not problematic despite the trivial nature of the "red hair" material. This second example fails not because of lack of "informational weight", but because "talking" often takes "with" as a prepositional reference to another party or to a manner, e.g. "talking with Janet", "talking with a shrill tone", which makes the red example ill-formed because it is confusingly ambiguous. An alternative of the same general structure might not be, e.g.:

1. Some guy with a protest sign was ranting loudly.
2. Some guy was ranting loudly with a protest sign.

Both of those work, though some of us in the latter case would have a comma between "loudly" and "with", and it is clearly clumsier overall than "Some guy with a protest sign was ranting loudly." Nevertheless, the second version is something that someone might utter verbally in attempting to describe a situation.

There may be a source somewhere for a general idea that relatively "informationally heavy" constituents (usually clauses and sometimes prepositional phrases) are more often extraposed – to rephrase that a bit. It's probably also sourceable that extraposition can occur out of subjects, in ways distinct from topicalization and wh-fronting. But the third claim, that extraposition "cannot occur beyond informationally heavy material", is self-evidently false.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:16, 14 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]