The discursive status of extraposed object clauses

• Factive, i.e. semantically presupposed, complements are not necessarily given.
• Extraposed object clauses are not necessarily given or semantically presupposed.
• Only in factive constructions is object extraposition truly optional.
• Object extraposition expresses an emphatic speaker assertion.
• The emphatic assertion implies additional discursive (cohesive/attitudinal) meanings.

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the English object extraposition construction, which involves the anticipation of a complement clause by an expletive pronoun it in object position, as in he’ll appreciate it that you’ve taken the time to return his book. In the existing literature, the presence or absence of anticipatory it has been associated with interpretive differences in terms of the givenness and/or presupposition of the extraposed clause. From an empirical perspective, however, neither of these concepts can be applied to all instances of optionally extraposed object complements. As an alternative, I propose that object extraposition essentially has a discursive function: it involves the speaker's emphatic assertion of the main clause predication in order to convey additional speaker-hearer related meanings.