Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• DEPRAETERE, I

Titel

Foregrounding in English relative clauses

Ist Teil von

• Linguistics, 1996, Vol.34 (4), p.699-732

Ort / Verlag

Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York

Erscheinungsjahr

1996

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Properties of foregrounding in English relative clauses are explored. Defining criteria of the foreground are delineated by way of critical observations on the claim that the rule of foregrounding is an implicature & that foregrounding only occurs in past-tense main clauses. The roles of (un)boundedness & (a)telicity in determining the foreground status of a situation are also examined. It is determined that a situation belonging to the foreground must be (1) represented as bounded, (2) posterior to the situation mentioned in the previous clause, & (3) in linear order with respect to other clauses according to the order of events. The possibility of foregrounding in restrictive & nonrestrictive relative clauses in English is explored by applying these criteria to corpus examples & an elicitation test in which native speakers of English (N = 63) judged the temporal order in an unspecified number of relative clauses. Nonrestrictive relative clauses, unlike restrictive relative clauses, are found to be more likely to contain foregrounded information due to the functional differences of the two types of clauses. 35 References. Adapted from the source document