In his latest book on relative clauses, Cinque claims that there are two fundamentally different kinds of appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses. The unintegrated ones are the typical English type, the integrated ones are found in various languages, including Chinese and Japanese. This… read more
How do people understand figurative speech in a foreign language? What strategies do they use? By means of an online questionnaire, this study investigated to what extent contextual information and transfer play a role in the interpretation of idioms in a second language, controlling for… read more
Parentheses do not affect the semantic truth conditions of the host clause, but they do affect the discourse structure. We propose a maximally simple update system for the conversational context. Presuppositions are treated as past requests for the interlocutor’s consent. Parentheticals act like… read more
Extraposition and right node raising (RNR) can interact in two ways: from a descriptive point of view, the result of each can be used as input for the other. Embedding of the former process or configuration inside the latter explains apparent violations of the right periphery condition associated… read more
Right-dislocation constructions, including backgrounding and specificational afterthoughts, are subject to various limitations. Dislocated phrases themselves are islands for extraction. Moreover, there are proximity effects between dislocated phrases and their correlate in the host clause. The… read more
We propose to analyze right-dislocation constructions in terms of clausal coordination, coupled with ellipsis. While neither rightward movement nor base-generation of backgrounded and afterthought phrases is descriptively accurate, we show that the facts follow straightforwardly on an analysis… read more
Syntactic and semantic characteristics canonically associated with main clauses do not always go together. This paper discusses two puzzling construction types from this perspective: appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and quasi-relatives. I argue that ARCs and appositions are related, and that… read more
Parentheses are included in their host sentences, but at the same time they show unintegrated behavior. This article studies this Janus-faced phenomenon from a syntactic point of view. There are two main parts. The first introduces the term Invisibility for syntactic independence based on the… read more