Vacuous It-Extraposition: A Lexicalist, Construction-based Approach

Abstract

English licenses the extraposition of a clausal expression to the sentence final position while introducing the expression it in the object position. The object extraposition also includes the so-called vacuous extraposition in which the expletive object and the allegedly extraposed CP are adjacent. This paper investigates actual uses of the vacuous object extraposition, using contemporary corpora. Based on the empirical data obtained from the comprehensive corpus search, we suggest that the illocutionary rule of assertion plays a key role in licensing the construction, in addition to the factive lexical semantics of the matrix verb in question. Together with the assumption that English employs not only verbal but also nominal extraposition, we also offer a construction-based analysis that can account for the licensing conditions as well as grammatical properties of the construction.