Journal Article

Focus effect story of relative clause extraposition

Lee, Seung Han

2023

Overview

This study proposes that relative clause extraposition (hearafter RCE) is employed to produce stronger focus effect (i.e., pitch increase) on main predicate, thus delivering speaker's illocutionary acts more remarkably. At first glance, data of relevance here drawn from BYU-BNC, COCA, and Buckeye Speech Corpus provide us with a principal finding that not only is the heaviest weight of relative clause likely to be one trigger for extraposition, but discourse-based RCE is also classified into four types under the assumption of extraposed relativizer as cohesive device. More to the point, we highlight the duration of silent pause occurring in the hitatus between main predicate and extraposed relative pronoun in order to prove discontinuous structure of RCE. Unexpectedly, the length of silent pause decreases when the information on extraposed relative clause loads more than thirteen words. This idiosyncratic behavior leads us to assume that focus effect determiners are hierarchically ordered and also their combinations are ranked according to different degrees of focus effect. It is thus no coincidence that extraposition of relative clause is highly favored over its canonical construction, thereby rendering focus effect more salient. We go a step further in claiming that focus cohesion principle provides a plausible explanation for the decreasing pause duration of RCE with the help of one questionnaire survey. Suffice to say, focused main predicate of RCE hauls its neighboring constituent, thereby leading to collapse of grammatical device, decrease of pause duration, and even misunderstanding of utterance.

• Publisher: Kyung Hee Institute for the Study of Language and Information
• Subject: Cohesion / Focus / Language / Miscommunication / Pauses / Predicate / Relative clauses / Speech / Speech acts / Speeches / Studies