期刊名称：Cercles : Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1292-8968
出版年度：2013
期号：29
页码：46-66
出版社：Université de Rouen
摘要：It is often said that, like NPs, clauses which are phrasal cannot (or can rarely) undergo extraposition. It is especially the case for instance of nominal –ing clauses. Except when introduced by such embedding predicates as be no use, be worth, these clauses are not considered as extraposable 1 . Quirk et al. (1985) for example think that the sentence It's fun(,) being a hostess is unlikely to contain an extraposition (even though this is one possible interpretation). Rather, they consider the –ing clause here as a noun-phrase tag (or right- dislocation). Huddleston (1984) gives the following extraposed example as ungrammatical or doubtful: .It has caused many of us great distress seeing him treat her like that (whereas it would be fne with an infnitive clause). The author deems the extraposition of –ing clauses to be nevertheless possible in short sentences (It's been nice meeting you; it was useful having her with us ). Smolka (2005) and Kaltenb.ck (2004), for their part, show that with –ing clauses, contrary to what happens with the other nominal clauses (that, infnitive), extraposition is the marked structure. Non-extraposition is more frequent than extraposition. So it seems that extraposition is indeed rather rare, and found mainly with certain embedding predicates
