Discourse constraints on (non)extraposition from subject in English

This paper analyzes the discourse conditions governing the choice between e xtraposition and nonextraposition of that-clause and infinitival-VP subject s. On the basis of a large corpus of naturally, occurring data, it is shown that nonextraposition requires that the content of the subject be discours e-old or directly inferrable. If the content is discourse-new, then extrapo sition is necessary. The choice between extraposition and nonextraposition for discourse-old and inferrable subjects is examined and is shown to depen d on the discourse status of the predicate and on whether it is the predica te or the subject that links to the following discourse. The paper ends wit h a discussion of the syntactic position of nonextraposed sentential subjec ts and concludes that it cannot be the same as that of fronted sentential c omplements. This means that the common discourse properties of fronting and nonextraposition must be linked to their common linear ordering properties , rather than to a common syntactic position.