The purpose of this book is to describe the main formal and functional characteristics of all the syntactic processes of thematization and postponement in English. It describes in detail the main aspects of cleft sentences, reversed-pseudo cleft sentences, topicalization, inversion, left-dislocation, passive, extraposition, existential sentences, pseudo-cleft sentences, postposition and right-dislocation.

The main aspects of use will be illustrated with examples from three novels written by the South African writer Alan Paton. The book is divided into three main chapters: the first one is a general introduction which explains some general concepts related to word order, to the corpus of examples and to Alan Paton, the author of the novels chosen as a corpus of examples; the second chapter is devoted to the syntactic processes of thematization in English and the third one to the syntactic processes of postponement.