Word.ws English Dictionary

extraposition

extraposition noun: the movement of an element from its normal place to one at the end, or near the end, of a sentence.

Noun

extraposition (countable and uncountable, plural extrapositions)

  1. 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...2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Locality in Language Processing” (chapter 4), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 110

Forms of extraposition

pluralextrapositions

Origin of extraposition

From extra- + position.

Questions about extraposition

What does extraposition mean?
Extraposition means the movement of an element from its normal place to one at the end, or near the end, of a sentence.
What part of speech is extraposition?
Extraposition is a noun.
What is the plural of extraposition?
The plural of extraposition is extrapositions.

Words near extraposition in the dictionary

  1. extraposable
  2. extrapose
  3. extraposed
  4. extraposes
  5. extraposing
  6. extraposition
  7. extrapositions
  8. extraprofessional
  9. extraprosodic
  10. extraprosodically
  11. extraprosodicity

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: extraposition (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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