The clausal complementation of good in extraposition constructions: The emergence of partially filled constructions

This article develops a functional synchronic-diachronic description of the clausal
complement patterns found with good in extraposition constructions (ECs), and compares
these to the patterns found with other deontic-evaluative adjectives, such as appropriate,
important and fitting. The adjectives studied can currently take either mandative
complements expressing desired action, or propositional complements describing
arguable claims. Good differs from adjectives such as appropriate and important in that it
currently favours propositional to-clauses. More specifically, I will argue that it occurs in
two types of partially filled constructions in the sense of Goldberg (1995) featuring such
complements, viz. the locative pattern and the knowledge/acquisition of knowledge
(KAK) pattern. The diachronic data will reveal that good started to prefer propositional
to-clauses only recently, amongst others through the emergence of the KAK pattern in
Late Modern English and its subsequent rise in frequency. In addition, the present-day
occurrence of purely evaluative adjectives like nice and great in the locative and KAK
constructions suggests that analogy with this class of adjectives may have played a role as
well.