| The overall aim of this dissertation is to make a detailed study of the it-extraposition construction within the framework of the information structure theory. Ever since Otto Jespersen (1933/1953) coined the term, extraposition has long been the interest of many linguistic schools and there have come out a lot of research findings. But most of the researches have been concerned with the derivation and grammaticality of the extraposition construction. Little has been done on the functions and conditioning of this construction. This dissertation first provides a detailed account of the internal structure of the it-extraposition construction, and then expounds on the various factors governing the choice between the it-extraposition construction and its non-extraposition counterpart by means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the basis of the investigation and examination of the hundreds of examples collected for this study and with reference to the corpus investigation data from Herriman (2000) and Biber, et al (1999). Through the investigation, examination and analysis, the dissertation reveals that extraposition, or the it-extraposition construction to be exact, is not derived or transformed from a basic or canonical form. Although they are related in structure and logical meaning, extraposition and non-extraposition are not free variants and thus cannot be interchanged at random as far as their information distribution and pragmatic functions are concerned. For example,(1) a. That he has failed in the exam is a pity. (formal but rare, and with"pity"being the new information)b. It is a pity that he has failed in the exam. (less formal but common, and usually with the that-clause providing the new information)In cases like the examples in the following, since one version is ungrammatical, interchangeability is certainly out of the question.(2) a. It seemed to me that he was lying.b. *That he was lying seemed to me.
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