Abstract
I argue that parenthetical verb clauses (PVCs) (Urmson in Mind 1952) such as John reckons, I confess, and she hopes always modify (that is, ‘have an interpretative effect upon’) propositions that may express illocutionary force. I illustrate that the apparent ability of PVCs to modify subclausal constituents is illusory, and that insights into how PVCs interact with the proposition that they modify are gained from exploring the syntactic mechanisms that maintain this illusion—the most important of which is the insight that constructions in which a PVC is observed modifying a subclausal constituent are best understood as fragment amalgams.
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Notes
The distribution of parenthetical coordinators is terra incognita. Only certain types of parenthetical insertions may employ them, and very often the choice of coordinator is restricted by the type of parenthetical. For instance, the apposition in (26a) cannot display the parenthetical conjoiner and; it appears to select only for or (see (i)). Integrated parentheticals do not permit the use of a coordinator. The example in (ii) illustrates that PVCs are interpreted as unintegrated when a parenthetical coordinator is displayed. Integrated parentheticals without an unintegrated counterpart are rendered unacceptable if a parenthetical coordinator is employed (iii).
More accurately, C&T only extend the analysis in (38) to PVCs that follow their host, as they do not discuss utterance-medial PVC constructions at all. The analysis in (38) easily extends to these medial cases however, if one adopts the par-Merge approach (see Sect. 2.2).
C&T (2001:26, en.13) provide (i) as evidence that pro_zo may be phonologically realised.
- (i)
C&T concede that examples like (i) are ‘much more limited than host-final [par -PVC—J.G.] constructions’. I do not believe that (i) provides an example of pro_zo. (i) is neither a fragment answer nor a modified constituent, it is a CP; and, according to C&T, pro_zo is limited to PVCs that precede fragment answers and constituents. To my (non-native) ear, (i) is a self-reporting clause of an idiomatic expression, and therefore does not function as a PVC in any sense. In this case, zo is understood as ‘thus’, as in the examples in fn. 9.
I refer to the two operations that derive fragment answers—namely, remnant-movement and TP-ellipsis—simply as ellipsis hereafter.
Another property commonly cited as a diagnostic of root clause status is V2 in Germanic. While German permits embedded V2, standard Dutch does not. An anonymous reviewer is concerned that the absence of V2 embedded clauses in Dutch is suggestive of Dutch’s lack of utterance-initial PVCs. I contest this, as utterance-initial clauses in Dutch may receive a PVC-interpretation regardless of the position of the embedded verb (i). Thus, the availability of V2 in Dutch and German embedded clauses seems to be tied to some extraneous restriction, not to the parenthetical interpretation of the embedding verb. The same reasoning applies to topicalisation in embedded clauses. Dutch permits embedded fragment answers (ii), which are derived via a topicalisation operation permitted only under ellipsis—i.e. when the complementiser (and the remainder of the clause excluding the remnant of ellipsis) is rendered unpronounced (Temmerman 2013).
-
(i)
Ik ben bang dat je kat dood is. (I’m afraid that your cat is dead.) Dutch
- (ii)
-
(i)
That the degradation in acceptability in (50) is caused by pragmatic incoherence and not syntactic ill-formedness is exemplified by comparing the constructions in (50) to (iB). (iB) is completely unacceptable because the factive verb deny does not permit embedded topicalisation (ii), and thus do not permit embedded fragment answers. If similar restrictions were enforced in (50), one would expect the examples in (50) to be completely unacceptable too. That they are not, and that manipulation of the context increases or decreases their acceptability, suggests a pragmatic explanation for the degradation observed in (50).
- (i)
-
(ii)
I don’t who exactly Lucy kissed, but I deny that {she kissed Pete /* Pete she kissed}.
The diagnostics employed in (51) to (56) come from Merchant (2004:676–684).
Paratactic coordination of e (typically a DP, NP, AP, or PP) and the IC (a CP) clearly violates the Law of Coordination of Likes. Kluck, building on the work of Koster (2000), argues that paratactic coordination need not obey this law. Rather than attempt to condense Kluck’s in-depth argumentation here, I refer the interested reader to her work (Kluck 2011: Sect. 7.2).
If ellipsis does not occur in (74), the construction is unacceptable, as (i) illustrates. This suggests that, unlike ellipsis in sluices (Ross 1967) and regular fragment answers (Merchant 2004), ellipsis is obligatory in Horn-amalgams (and consequently fragment amalgams, see Sect. 5.2). How to model obligatory ellipsis is still uncertain (though see Richards 2001 and Thoms 2012 for pertinent proposals). That ellipsis is obligatory in Horn and fragment amalgams is not cause for suspicion however, as obligatory ellipsis is required in other well-studied elliptical constructions too, such as multiple sluices (Park and Kang 2007) (ii), swipes (Hartman and Ai 2009) (iii) and comparative deletion (Kennedy and Merchant 2000) (iv).
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(i)
*John is going to [I think it is Chicago that John is going to on Sunday] on Sunday.
- (ii)
- (iii)
-
(iv)
Norman wrote as interesting a thesis as Bert did [
write a thesis].
-
(i)
Note that the coreference between the content kernel and the IC is regular coreference, of the type R-expressions and pronouns display across the discourse. It is not Agree, or any other linking mechanism that requires c-command to pertain between the ‘probe’ and ‘goal’. That this relationship is anaphoric correctly predicts that coreference can be sustained at a distance, as (i) illustrates. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.)
-
(i)
Bill gates has a fortune of [e i I heard the news that CNN claims that it is [more than 100 billion dollars]i].
Note however that coreference alone does not suffice to license e, as e is illicit in environments where coreference is established but e is not provided a definite description by a finite CP modifier (ii).
- (ii)
That e’s distribution is limited to amalgams raises the concern that its postulation is ad hoc. Fortunately, independent warrant for postulating e is available. From a semantic perspective, e is required to ensure that (iiia) correctly entails (iiib). (An account like C&T’s incorrectly predicts that (iiia) entails (iiic).) Also, from an empirical perspective, e can be morphologically realised (iv).
- (iii)
-
(iv)
John kissed {e/someone}—I think Mary—on Saturday.
-
(i)
One might argue that the it-cleft in (79) is c-selected by a parenthetical verb, contrary to my claim. I do not deny that the verb convinced can be used as a PVC (see (i)). All parenthetical verbs have a non-parenthetical function (see Sect. 1). What is important to assess is whether a verb performs a parenthetical function in the environment in which it is observed. In (79), convinced refers to an action due to be performed by the speaker. It does not refer to the speaker’s mental state of being convinced—a state to which the speaker shifts the burden of responsibility for the truth of the assertion John has stolen my identity in (i). Thus, the use of convinced observed in (79) results in an unintegrated insertion when interpolated into a host clause (see (ii)), and not an integrated par-PVC.
-
(i)
John has, I’m quite convinced, stolen my identity.
-
(ii)
John has—I have to convince you—stolen your identity.
-
(i)
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
An anonymous reviewer wonders why, if fragment amalgams contain fragment answers, island violations are that are observed some fragment answers are not observed in fragment amalgams. This can be explained by appeal to the parallelism constraint discussed in Sect. 4. Recall that island violations are observed under ellipsis only if (A) a contrastive relationship pertains between the remnant of ellipsis and its correlate in the licensing clause (see (57)), and (B) the correlate is an accommodated argument contained within an island (see fn. 21). In fragment amalgams, neither situation arises. Regarding (A), the correlate in fragment amalgams (e, akin to someone, something, etc.) and the remnant (jam in (i)) always stand in a non-contrastive relation: a relation that permits islands to be obviated under fragments (see (58)). Regarding (B), the correlate, while implicit, need never be accommodated, as the presence of the IC entails the presence of correlate.
- (i)
It is important to note here that no difference in acceptability pertains between PVC-initial fragment amalgams (i.e. ‘…I think Chicago…’) and PVC-final fragment amalgams (i.e. ‘…Chicago I think…’) with respect to quantifier and reflexive binding. Thus, in (87) and (89), the same judgements hold regardless of the linear position of the PVC respective to the content kernel.
For an anonymous reviewer, (92) is unacceptable without the accusatively Case-marked diesen. This suggests that Kluck’s (2011) analysis of Horn-amalgams may need some amendment in order to account for possible speaker variation in the case-marking of the it-cleft’s pivot.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to the audiences of TIN-dag 2012 (Utrecht, Feb 2012) and the Parenthesis and Ellipsis workshop at DGfS 2013 (Potsdam, March 2013) for their helpful comments. This research was financially supported by the European Research Counsel.
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Griffiths, J. Parenthetical verb constructions, fragment answers, and constituent modification. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 33, 191–229 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9256-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9256-6