Apposition and the structure of discourse

Abstract

The current dissertation focuses on two interpretational properties of APPOSITIVE CONSTRUCTIONS: (i) their (often) NOT-AT-ISSUE status, i.e. the fact that they can be perceived as secondary to the main point of the utterance, and (ii) their PROJECTION behavior, i.e. the fact that they typically escape the scope of external operators (e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 2000, Potts 2005). I analyze appositive constructions as adjuncts (e.g. Jackendoff 1977, Potts 2005) which are interpreted as in-situ conjuncts. Root clauses, appositive relative clauses, and possibly all appositive constructions are assumed to form FORCE PHRASES (see Rizzi 1997, Krifka 2001). Force heads are operators which introduce a fresh variable for the proposition of their scope. Since lexical expressions (operators or predicates) are relativized to propositional variables, Force heads can bind into the lexical expressions in their syntactic scope (cf. Stone 1999, Stone & Hardt 1999). This mechanism keeps apart appositive content from main clause content and is key to explaining the exceptional properties of appositives mentioned above. First, propositional variables introduced by Force heads express proposals to update the context set. The fact that appositive proposals are usually introduced before main clause proposals explains why appositives are often not at-issue: all proposals associated with a sentence are silently accepted except the one introduced last, which is at-issue. Second, similarly to Force heads, lexical operators introduce propositional variables for the content of their scope, but, unlike Force heads, can be bound and thus interact with higher operators. Since appositives form separate ForcePs, their interpretation does not depend on whether or not they appear in the syntactic scope of higher operators such as negation or modals. In other words, appositive content necessarily projects. The proposed analysis is embedded into a discourse model in which SPEECH CONTEXTS keep track of individual speech participants, their discourse commitments, and the context set (see Stalnaker 1978, Kaplan 1989, Farkas & Bruce 2010). The analysis is fleshed out in UPDATE WITH SPEECH CONTEXTS, an update logic in which the formal mechanisms of interpreting formulas and restricting the context set are kept separate (see also AnderBois et al. 2010, Murray 2010, Bittner 2011).

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