FOREGROUNDING IN ENGLISH RELATIVE CLAUSES

The aim of this article is twofold. first, we want to delineate the de fining criteria of the foreground In older to list its necessary and s ufficient characteristics, critical observations are made on the claim that the rule of foregrounding is an implicature and that foregroundi ng only occurs in past-tense main clauses. The issue whether it is (un )boundedness rather than (a) telicity that determines whether a situat ion belongs to the foreground is also dealt with. The second aim of th is paper is to find out whether foregrounding is possible in (non)rest rictive relative clauses in English. Answering this question involves applying the criteria determined in part A to relative clauses The obs ervations made are based on corpus examples and on the results of an e licitation test.