The Studies On Grammatical Structures Of English Extraposed Relative Clauses From The Perspective Of End-Weight And End-Focus Principle

Extraposition, as a prevalent phenomenon, is frequently-used in humanlanguage. In English, the relative clause extraposition (RCE) refers to thephenomenon that a noun, in a sentence, is modified by a non-adjacent relative clause(RC), which results in a discontinuous dependency. The sentence-These books arevery useful that I borrowed from library-is an example, and this type of extrapostionwidely exists in formal speech, formal writing as well as informal styles. Consideringthe postposition plays a major role in extraposition, this thesis will especially focus onthis topic.From the previous literature, the author notices that most of the studies on thisarea are from the perspective of syntactic structure. They hold the opinion that theexistence of RCE violates the rule of X-bar theory, which requires that the modifiersshould occur as either complements to the head or as adjuncts to a phrasal projectionof the head. However, having analyzed the extraposition in different clauses, theauthor observes that the existence of extraposition has strong connections with thesentence information structure. Because compared with canonical structure sentences,the relative clause extraposition (RCE) will be processed more efficiently incommunication and production when the RC expresses new, contrastive or importantinformation and the VP expresses old or less important information. Specifically, RCEadheres to the tendency of focused constituents to occur later in a sentence than old orgiven information, which is coincident with the essence of end-weight principle andend-focus principle. The end-focus refers to the information that is or sounds new tothe eye of the reader or the ear of the hearer, and should be placed to the end of thesentence; while the end-weight is to put the ‘heavy’, namely the long and complexconstituents, to the latter part of the sentence, thus avoids the imbalance and theincongruity of the whole. Therefore, it is of great significance in doing research on this issue under the theoretical basis of the end-focus and end-weight principle. Thisthesis is trying to concentrate on the extraposion in the main six English clauses, withan attempt to clarify the grammatical structure of extraposition that affected by theend-weight and end-focus principles. Besides, from the analysis, the result manifeststhe differences and similarities of the ubiquitous extraposition among these clauses,which provides a comprehensive understanding for the characteristics of theextraposed structures. Furthermore, the marked word order of RCE may be exploitedby speakers to highlight the information status of the RC.