ABSTRACT

Parentheticals Parentheticals are expressions of varying length, complexity, function and syntactic category, which are interpolated into the current string of the utterance. Expressions that have been argued to be parenthetical in nature include sentence adverbials and adverbial clauses, oneword expressions (e.g. English like, say, what), comment clauses (e.g. English I think, I suppose, you know, German glaube ich, French je pense), reporting verbs (e.g. English he said, said she), vocatives, nominal appositions, non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRC), question tags, and various types of full or elliptical clauses (cf. Dehé and Kavalova 2007 and Kaltenböck 2007 for overviews). In syntax, a contradiction exists between

far-reaching structural independence of the parenthetical from its host utterance on the one hand and linear order and certain existing hierarchical relations on the other hand. Accordingly, parentheticals have either been argued to be external to the syntactic structure of their host sentence (e.g. Haegeman 1988; Peterson 1999; Espinal 1991; Burton-Roberts 1999b), or loosely related to it, for example, in terms of adjunction (Ross 1973; Emonds 1973, 1976, 1979; McCawley 1982; Corver and Thiersch 2002; Potts 2002; D’Avis 2005; Vries 2005, 2007) or insertion (Ackema and Neeleman 2004). Those approaches that assume structural independence account for linearization and apparent surfacing relationships along the lines of semantic association (e.g. Peterson 1999), utterance interpretation (e.g. Haegeman 1988), or serialization in the phonetic component (e.g. Haider 2005).