caa a22 4500 388058757 CHVBK 20180307125114.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199803 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0954394500001204 doi S0954394500001204 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0954394500001204 Geisler Christer University of Uppsala Infinitival relative clauses in spoken discourse [Elektronische Daten] [Christer Geisler] This article concerns infinitival relative clauses, such as Mary is the person to ask, and their distribution in spoken English. It analyzes the correlation between the function of the antecedent in the relative clause and the function of the whole postmodified NP (the relative complex) in the matrix clause. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of spoken British English, I show that the grammatical function of the antecedent in the infinitival relative clause depends on the function of the antecedent in the matrix clause. I argue that the distribution of antecedent functions in the matrix clause can be explained in terms of thematic properties and information structure of the clauses in which the infinitival relatives occur. A key notion is that speakers center their discourse around information that they assume to be important for the communicative event. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998 Language Variation and Change Cambridge University Press 10/1(1998-03), 23-41 0954-3945 10:1<23 1998 10 LVC https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500001204 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500001204 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Geisler Christer University of Uppsala NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Language Variation and Change Cambridge University Press 10/1(1998-03), 23-41 0954-3945 10:1<23 1998 10 LVC CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge