Extraposition as a nonlocal dependency

Recently, it has been argued (Keller, 1995; van Eynde, 1996) that extraposition (of complement clauses, relatives, and PP’s, among others) is best treated as a nonlocal dependency. To this end, a feature EXTRA is introduced, whose function and distribution is similar to that of SLASH, except that it accounts for filler-phrases which follows rather than precede their head. In this paper, we first summarize the account of (it-) extraposition of complement clauses in Dutch presented in Bouma (1996). Two arguments for a nonlocal treatment are presented: the extraposed complement is sometimes in a position where it clearly cannot be a local complement of its governor, and, second, the interaction of fronting and extrapositionwith insertion of expletive it suggests that both phenomena must be analyzed using nonlocal features. In section 3 we present an nonlocal approach to complement extraposition, based on the ‘head-driven’ approach to nonlocal dependencies outlined in Sag (1995). The remainder of the paper discusses various consequences of the analysis. First, we address the question how to extend the analysis to extraposition of adjunct phrases, such as relative clauses or PP’s. We argue that these are best handled by a lexical rule which adds (extraposable) adjuncts to the EXTRA-list of the heads they modify. Second, we observe that, given an ‘headdriven’ approach to extraposition, the right-roof constraint on extraposition is not easily accounted for. Finally, we focus on the interaction between extraposition and fronting. In Dutch, it is possible to extrapose out of a fronted clause, as well as front an element out of an extraposed clause. We demonstrate that such cases can be accounted for without introducing spurious ambiguity.