Information package

The grammar of the clause makes available a number of constructions that enable us to express a given core meaning in different ways depending on how we wish to to present or `package’ the information.

Kim broke the vase

The vase was broken by Kim

The vase Kim broke

It was Kim who broke the vase

What Kim broke was the vase

All have the same core meaning in the sense that there is no situation or context in which one of them would be true and another false (assuming of course that we are talking of the same Kim and the same vase).

The first of them, Kim broke the vase, is the syntactically most basic, while the others belong to various information-packaging constructions.

Important common information packages

#	Construction	a. Marked Form	b. Unmarked / Basic Form
i	Preposing	This one you can keep.	You can keep this one.
ii	Postposing	I’ve lent to Jill the only copy that has been corrected.	I’ve lent the only copy that has been corrected to Jill.
iii	Inversion	In the bag was a gold watch.	A gold watch was in the bag.
iv	Passive	The car was driven by Sue.	Sue drove the car.
v	Existential	There was a doctor on board.	A doctor was on board.
vi	Extraposition	It’s clear that she is ill.	That she is ill is clear.
vii	Cleft	It was Kim that suggested it.	Kim suggested it.
viii	Pseudo-cleft	What I need is a cold drink.	I need a cold drink.
ix	Dislocation	It’s excellent, this curry.	This curry is excellent.

• In the first three we are concerned simply with the order of elements, while the others involve more radical changes.

• The basic position for the Complement this one in [i] is after the verb, but in [a] it is preposed, placed at the front of the clause.

• In [ii] the basic position for the Object, the only copy that has been corrected, is just after the verb but long or complex elements like this can be postposed, placed at the end.

• In [iii] the positions of the Subject and Complement of the basic version [b] are reversed in the inversion construction [a]. (More precisely, this is Subject-Dependent inversion, in contrast to the Subject-auxiliary inversion construction discussed earlier. The Dependent is usually a Complement but can also be an Adjunct, as in Three days later came news of her death.)

• In [iv] (the only one where the basic version has a distinct name, `active’) the Object becomes Subject, the Subject becomes Complement of by and the auxiliary be is added.

• The existential construction applies mainly with the verb be: the basic Subject is displaced to follow the verb and the semantically empty pronoun there takes over the Subject function.

• In [vib] the Subject is a subordinate clause (that she is ill); in [a] this is extraposed, placed after the verb phrase and this time the Subject function is taken over by the pronoun it.

• In [vii] the cleft clause is formed by dividing the basic version into two parts: one (Kim) is highlighted by making it Complement of a clause with it as Subject and be as verb, while the other is backgrounded by relegating it to a subordinate clause (a distinct subtype of relative clause).

• The pseudo-cleft construction is similar, but this time the subordinated part is put in a fused relative (what I need) functioning as Subject of be.

• Dislocation belongs to fairly informal style. It differs from the basic version in having an extra noun phrase, set apart intonationally and related to a pronoun in the main Subject-Predicate part of the clause. In the left dislocation variant the pronoun occurs to the left of the noun phrase; in right dislocation it is the other way round, as in His father, she can’t stand him.

Notes

Canonical counterpart

Basic counterpart need not be canonical. For convenience we have chosen examples in [64] where the basic counterparts are all canonical clauses, but of course they do not need to be.

The basic (active) counterpart of passive:

Was the car driven by Kim?

is:

Did Kim drive the car?,

Which is non-canonical by virtue of being interrogative.

Likewise the non-cleft counterpart of:

It was Sue who had been interviewed by the police

is:

Sue had been interviewed by the police,

Which is non-canonical by virtue of being passive: note then that certain combinations of the information-packaging constructions are possible.

Construction

The information-packaging construction may be the only option.

The second point is that under certain circumstances what one would expect to be the basic counterpart is in fact ungrammatical.

Thus we can say:

There was an accident

but not:

~~ An accident was~~

Here the existential construction is the only option.

One difference between actives and passives is that the by phrase of the passive is an optional element whereas the element that corresponds to it in the active, namely the Subject, is generally obligatory in finite clauses. Compare, then:

Some mistakes were made by Ed (by phrase, long)

Some mistakes were made (short)

Ed made some mistakes (active)

Short passives have no active counterpart. They are in fact the more common type of passive, allowing information to be omitted that would have to be expressed in the active construction.