The Syntactic Integration of Appositives: Evidence from Fragments and Ellipsis

The goal of this squib is to explain an intriguing data set involving appositives and fragment answers, thereby providing support for the idea that appositives, and by extension parentheses more generally, are related to the host clause in syntax, via parenthetical coordination.

1 Introduction: To Integrate or Not

Appositives include appositions and appositive relative clauses (ARCs), such as those illustrated in (1a) and (1b), respectively. In both examples, the anchor is John.

1. 1.

   1. a. John, my neighbor, is a good guy.

   2. b. John, who is my neighbor, is a good guy.

Various approaches to these construction types abound in the literature (see De Vries 2006, Dehé and Kavalova 2007, Heringa 2011:122-139, and Kluck 2012 for overviews). We split these lines of thought asunder. What is of special interest is the question of whether and how an appositive is related to its anchor. Orphanage approaches maintain that appositives are syntactically isolated from their anchor; integration approaches do assume a structural relationship, albeit possibly of a special kind. For instance, Haegeman (1991) claims that parentheticals are derived separately from their host clause, as syntactic "orphans"; they are only interpreted as related to their host when "contextualized" post-LF. Espinal (1991) argues that parentheticals and the host clause lie on different planes in a three-dimensional space. Hence, they are syntactically unrelated to the host but intersect with it at the terminal string, as is somewhat suggestively depicted in our example (2).

1. 2.

Although the abovementioned approaches account for the well-known scopal independence of parentheses (see below), we do not think the word string can be treated as a given; rather, it should be derivable from the syntactic structure (possibly in combination with some PF rule system). Therefore, let us turn to a more wholehearted integration approach, which we adopt below. De Vries (2009, 2012) argues that the appositive is "parenthetically coordinated" to the anchor, mediated by a syntactic functional head that can be dubbed Par.¹ Like a coordination phrase, ParP is inserted in the position of the relevant noun phrase, which then occupies its specifier (3).²

1. 3. [_{host_clause}[_ParP[_DP John] [_Par' Par⁰ [who is my neighbor]]] is a good guy].

To be clear, we discard a plain right-adjunction analysis of ARCs as in, for example, Jackendoff 1977 because it does not account for scopal independence, among other things. To illustrate, in (4) a quantifier in the host fails to bind a pronoun inside the ARC (see, e.g., Espinal 1991, De Vries 2007, and Kluck 2011 for more discussion).

1. 4. *Everybody_i laughed at Mary, who he_i saw last week.

In our approach, Parenthetical Merge effectively blocks c-command (see De Vries 2012 for details).

Adopting Par has some immediate benefits. First, the Par approach trivially explains why the anchor and the appositive are linearly adjacent, as they are phrase-mates. Note that this is much less clear on an orphanage approach (more generally, the unlinearizability of orphans or otherwise multirooted structures seems to be a major problem). Second, on a more abstract level—again presupposing that syntax mediates between sound and meaning—the head Par provides the necessary syntactic locus for Potts's (2005) "comma feature," the semantic operator that renders the information appositives convey as secondary to the proposition denoted by the host clause. Finally, a syntactic integration approach such as the Par account predicts that parentheticals can be recursively construed with respect to each other.

They obviously can, as (5) illustrates.

1. 5. I like linguists, who study language, such an intriguing phenomenon, as you know, and in particular syntacticians, the most intelligent of all.

Thus, there are clear indications for structural integration.

We cannot discuss the internal structure of appositives in this squib (see Cardoso and De Vries 2010, Heringa 2011, and the references there for extensive discussion). What interests us here is the connection between parenthetical material and the host (or a constituent thereof). Below, we discuss data involving fragment answers whose distribution receives a natural explanation on the Par approach. Such an account does not seem...