{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02473641524736415, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011759935117599351, 'mean_word_length': 5.245569620253165, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Extraposition as Parallel Construal *

Extraposition phenomena are traditionally accounted for by extraposition rules, possibly as instances of "move alpha". According to the more recent developments of generative grammar, such as Chomsky's minimalism (1995) and Kayne's antisymmetry theory (1994), extraposition rules are problematic and no longer permitted in any obvious sense. In this article, I will show that there are also numerous empirical reasons to reject extraposition rules and that extraposition is different from what it was always thought to be. More concretely, I will show that extraposition phenomena do not have the properties of "move alpha" but -instead-of parallel construal, as found in coordination and various other constructions.1 It is my hope that by providing such an alternative to the anomalous rules of extraposition, it will become clear that minimalism and antisymmetry theory will not only have one important problem less, but also that these recent theories lead to significant new insight with respect to long-standing empirical problems. Since most of my results have a bearing on Dutch, I will first make a few remarks about the word order of this language in general and indicate how the problem of extraposition relates to this overall picture. The modern generative consensus about the underlying structure of Dutch and German goes back to the early 1960s, when Emmon Bach and Manfred Bierwisch conjectured that German is underlyingly SOV. This idea was adopted in my own work on Dutch (Koster 1975), which provided further evidence and which was essentially an assimilation of the SOV hypothesis to Joseph Emonds's framework of root and structure-preserving transformations (Emonds 1970). According to this development, the surface SVO structure of Dutch (and German) was derived form the underlying SOV structure by the root transformation of Verb Second. This transformation placed the verb next to an initial XP position, which could be filled by either a subject, a topic, or a Wh-phrase. The assimilation to structurepreservingness was completed by Den Besten (1977), who reformulated the root transformation Verb Second as a structure-preserving substitution, that is, as a rule that substitutes the finite verb for a tense position that is filled in subordinated clauses by tenserelated complementizers (like English that). When Thiersch (1978) applied similar ideas to German, the SOV consensus was well under way.