Aimo Seppänen

Extraposed Subjects vs. Postverbal Complements: On the So-Called Obligatory Extraposition

The transformation which derived the b-variants of our sentences from the more basic avariants was normally conceived as an optional rule, but some cases were noted, both by Jespersen and other older grammarians and by the transformationalists, in which the avariant was not available and which might therefore be handled by specifying that the rule was sometimes obligatory. The cases in question seemed to fall into two rather different types, the first of which is illustrated in the following examples:

The Genitive / Possessive Pronoun Its

Among the minor problems facing the grammarian of English, the position of the form its takes a prominent place: on the one hand it has been recognized as a problem by generations of grammarians, on the other it has never received anything like a generally accepted solution. On the concrete level of raw data, the problem concerns the status of certain potential occurrences of the word. By way of illustration, consider the following examples.