A Construction-based Approach to English Appositives

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the syntax and semantics of English appositives within a construction-based Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) approach. Unlike previous studies, this study particularly focuses on the possibility that appositives can appear nonadjacent to the anchor noun phrase, either clause-medially or clause-finally. In previous literature, these nonadjacent appositives have been studied under the term afterthoughts instead of being subsumed under the appositional construction. By showing that afterthoughts possess the various properties that have been attested for appositives, I argue that appositives in the traditional sense (the anchor-adjacent ones) and afterthoughts should be treated a single construction. Therefore, I call appositives that appear adjacent to the anchor anchor-adjacent appositives and those that appear nonadjacent to the anchor afterthought appositives. There is no consensus among scholars on the syntactic status of the appositive. Some scholars, including Ott (2014), do not assume any syntactic relationship between the appositive and the host clause. Some others, for example Heringa (2007, 2012a), assimilate appositives to a coordination structure. These analyses are problematic in that they either miss the fact that the anchor and the appositive clearly form a syntactic constituent, or cannot be generalized to account for other parenthetical modifiers. Therefore, I propose that appositives are syntactically integrated into the host clause as NP-adjuncts. Specifically, I propose a new subtype of the head-modifier-cx (construction): head-parenthetical-modifier-cx. This construction includes various kinds of parenthetical modifiers, including appositives (head-appositive-cx). The head-appositive-cx has two subtypes: head-predicative-appositive-cx and head-identificational-appositive-cx. The nonadjacency between the anchor and the afterthought appositive is also explained through an already existing syntactic mechanism. Specifically, I use the feature EXTRA, which has been employed to account for various extraposition phenomena (Keller, 1995

Bouma, 1996

Van Eynde, 1996

Kay & Sag, 2012). By using this feature, clause-medial afterthought appositives and clause-final afterthought appositives are both well accounted for. In terms of semantics, I propose a new semantic dimension to deal with parenthetical elements, inspired by Potts (2005) work. As a result, SEM now has two subdimensions: M-SEM (matrix semantics) and P-SEM (parenthetical semantics). I provide a detailed account of how such bidimensional semantics works within the HPSG framework, interacting with the constraints on the newly proposed types and the existing semantic principles. A direct consequence of my account is that the parenthetical properties of appositives are dealt with in semantics, instead of having to assume a non-standard syntactic structure.