(The main content is fairly technical stuff about syntax. But there’s a side discussion of gay pornstars, their bodies, and their roles in man-man sex, so probably not suitable for kids.)
From the Boys in the Sand website (an appreciation of men’s bodies, mostly in gay porn), this arresting sentence from a posting on pornstars Micah Brandt and Rocco Steele:
(1) Which porn star does Micah Brandt think its’ a shame hasn’t fucked him? (Yet)
(apostrophe as in the original; but punctuation is not my topic here).
(1) strikes many speakers of English as plainly ungrammatical, though with some work you can figure out what question it’s asking (and the answer is: Rocco Steele). The problem with (1) is that it violates a constraint on “extraction” of material (in, among other constructions, Information, or WH, questions — as in (1) — and relative clauses) from within cerrtain sorts of embedded clauses, one of them being extraposed clauses, as in:
(2) Micah Brandt thinks it’s a shame [OR: it’s surprising] Rocco Steele hasn’t fucked him.
The extraposed clause is underlined, and the constituent questioned in (1), the subject in the extraposed clause, is boldfaced. It turns out that two structural features are crucial to the phenomenon: that the questioned constituent is in a particular sort of subordinate clause (an extraposed clause in this example); and that the questioned constituent is the suject of that clause.
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