Nominal appositives in grammar and discourse

In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their ho...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language (Baltimore) 2022-06, Vol.98 (2), p.359-391
Main Authors: Onea, Edgar, Ott, Dennis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Discourse
Grammar
Pragmatics
Semantics
Speech acts
Syntax
Theoretical linguistics
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Summary:In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-structuring potential questions. We show how these two assumptions combine to yield a comprehensive theory of NAPs that captures their central syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and furthermore sheds light on the mechanisms that govern their linear interpolation.
ISSN:0097-8507
1535-0665
1535-0665
DOI:10.1353/lan.2022.0004