Syntax Interface Lectures Utrecht

Agenda

23 April 2018

Mark de Vries (University of Groningen)

Appositions, interrupted

(over binnenbouw, buitenbouw en tussenbouw)

 

Semantically, there are two main types of appositions: predicative/attributive ones, as the underlined phrase in (1a), and identificational/specificational ones (1b); sometimes they are ambiguous.

 

(1a)     Alice consulted John Doe, an unknown linguist.

(1b)     Alice consulted a famous linguist, Noam Chomsky.

 

This raises the question if these types also have different internal syntactic structures. In line with the outcomes of earlier research, I argue that the predicative type is sentential (even if the visible apposition is simply a noun phrase); however, the second type is less ‘big’, perhaps just phrasal.

The second question is how – if at all – the apposition relates to the context, in particular the nominal anchor. I will assess the integration vs. orphanage debate, and show that syntactic integration is both inevitable and problematic.