Parenthetical Meaning
Final Report Abstract
This linguistic project investigated the meaning contribution of "parenthetical expressions". These are expressions that are commonly used in verbal and written communication but are intuitively felt not to be a proper part of the sentence. Parenthetical expressions include socalled "appositive relative clauses" (e.g., the underlined part in Lance, who was about to retire, admitted to doping), "slifting parentheticals" (e.g., the underlined part in The manager, Susan said, flirted with the senator), "question tags" (e.g., the underlined part in It's raining, isn't it?), etc. The main goal of the project was to show that, in spite of their apparent diversity in form, these expressions share a core meaning in three major aspects: (i) the linguistic act they perform when the host sentence is uttered, (ii) the way their meaning interacts with things like negation (i.e., not) and modal elements (e.g., possible, must, believe, allegedly, etc.), and (iii) the secondary status of the information they provide. The most important finding of the project was that, according to their linguistic behavior, parenthetical expressions fall into two large groups, which can be called "pure" vs. "impure." Pure parentheticals, like appositive relative clauses, are inert, in the sense of having no effect on the interpretation of the main sentence. Such parentheticals comment on the part of the sentence to which they are attached, but the information they carry is largely independent of anything else contained in the main sentence. By contrast, impure parentheticals do have an effect on how the main sentence as a whole is interpreted: e.g., slifting parentheticals qualify how certain the speaker is that the main sentence is true. As such, impure parentheticals attach to the entire sentence, and their occurrence in subordinate positions is severely restricted. More generally, the project substantiated the idea that pure and impure parentheticals manifest different degrees of linguistic integration, with impure parentheticals engaging more actively with the main sentence than pure parentheticals. In addition to the pure–impure distinction, the project identified and accounted for several linguistic puzzles about parentheticals that any theory of parentheticality must explain.
Publications
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Notions of at‐issueness. Language and Linguistics Compass, 12(12).
Koev, Todor
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Parentheticality, assertion strength, and polarity. Linguistics and Philosophy, 44(1), 113-140.
Koev, Todor
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Verum accent IS VERUM, but not always focus. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 6(1), 188.
Bill, Cory & Koev, Todor
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A unified analysis of polar particles in Farsi. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 7(1), 5268.
Mohammadi, Maryam
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Parenthetical Meaning.
Koev, Todor
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Really: Ambiguity and question bias. Sinn und Bedeutung 26: 130–148.
Bill, C. & T. Koev
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Gradient at-issueness versus uncertainty about binary at-issueness. Theoretical Linguistics, 49(3-4), 249-260.
Koev, Todor
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Mage as a bias particle in interrogatives. The 4th Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary: 31-39
Mohammadi, M.
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Which stress is on response particles? An empirical study. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 8(1), 5476.
Mohammadi, Maryam
