Dictionary

extraposition en · NOUN

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰs Proto-Indo-European *-teros Proto-Indo-European *h₁eǵʰsteros Proto-Italic *eksteros Latin exter Latin extrā English extra- English position English extraposition From extra- + position.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) The movement of an element from its normal place to one at the end, or near the end, of a sentence.
   • The relative clause who impressed the audience is adjacent to its head noun performer in (106a). The same relative clause crosses the root dependency coming into the main verb came in (106b): a crossed dependency. This structure was read more slowly in Levy et al.’s (2012) experiments, plausibly because of the crossed dependency: the extraposition. 2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Locality in Language Processing” (chapter 4), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 110:

Forms