SIL talk by Mark de Vries (University of Groningen)

Presupposition and main point: the case of parentheticals

Intuitively, parentheticals – including appositive material – present side-information of some sort. This may involve new propositional content. Similar to the situation for presuppositions, however, the information appears to be backgrounded. In the literature, this is often characterized as ‘not at issue’. There is a debate about nominal appositions in particular. According to Ott & Onea (contra Griffiths and various others), especially reformulating appositions can address the question under discussion, with consequences for their possible structural analysis. I will extend the emprical domain to parentheticals more generally.

It is important to see that there are different ways to define at issue (with different tests involved to establish this), as Koev and others noted; in addition, the linear position of the apposition – sentence-medial adjacent to the anchor, or sentence-final – is relevant.  In this talk, I will try to shed light on the following related questions:

– What is the best way to characterize parentheticals?

– What is the effect of linear position, and why?

– How do parentheticals other than appositions (such as comment clauses and and-parentheticals) behave according to various at issue tests?

– Does all of this lead to (new) conclusions about syntactic analyses?