Tim Stowell
University of California, Los Angeles
Previous analyses of parenthetical constituents have sought to capture their "interloper" status in various ways. Ross (1973) proposed that certain parentheticals (appositive relatives) originate as adjuncts to the main sentence, and that they are inserted into their surface position by a transformational rule, lowering them into the syntactic positions where they surface. Emonds (1976, 1979) adopted a similar view on the source location of parentheticals, but accounted for their sentence-medial position by assuming that the material that follows them forms a single phrase (XP) that has been moved to the right of the parenthetical by Heavy XP Shift. McCawley (1982) accounted for the placement of parenthetical adverbs in terms of a novel conception of constituent structure that allows for multiple domination and discontinuous constituent structure. Safir (1987)proposed that parenthetical appositive relatives are merged into the constituent structure at a remote level of representation called LF'. Potts (2002) treats parenthetical as-clauses as normal syntactic constituents, relying on novel rules of semantic interpretation to account for their apparently peripheral status.
I will advocate an approach that in some respects represents an update and extension of Emonds's approach. My proposal makes use of a combination of extraction and remnant movement to derive the surface position and provides a stucturally based account of their peripheral syntactic behavior.
If you are interested in
meeting with the speaker, please contact Kaori
Ozawa.
To go back to the Colloquium schedule, click here.