Course Description
This course explores the formal analysis of parenthesis, a universal and ubiquitous, yet sorely understudied linguistic phenomenon. Parenthetical expressions—such as this interjection—appear within ‘host’ sentences or at their peripheries, often with a considerable degree of freedom in their positioning. Peripheral parentheticals include vocatives, question tags, and afterthoughts; many other types, such as appositive nominals and relative clauses, comment clauses, and unrelated interruptions can appear linearly within a host sentence.
Traditional grammars distinguish parataxis from hypotaxis based on the intuition that parentheticals are not genuinely subordinate, but live on the same hierarchical plane as their hosts. Theoretical research has shown that parenthetical expressions are grammatically ‘encapsulated’ in ways that sharply distinguish them from arguments and adjuncts. This autonomy manifests itself in various ways pertaining to prosody, interpretation, and syntax.
This course will focus on the following interrelated questions: What are the grammatical properties of parentheticals? Do they attach to their host expressions syntactically (e.g., via Merge), or are they structurally separate, potentially elliptical expressions? Is their interpretation a matter of grammatical composition, or discourse-pragmatic principles? How do the various modules of the grammar interact to yield their prosodic, interpretive, and (non-)syntactic characteristics?
Area Tags: Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse, Linguistic Frameworks
(session 2) Monday/Thursday 1:30-2:50
Location: ILC N101
Instructor: Dennis Ott
Dennis Ott is associate professor of linguistics at the University of Ottawa and visiting professor at the University of the Basque Country (as Ikerbasque research associate). He completed a PhD in linguistics at Harvard University in 2011 and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Groningen and Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on A-bar movement phenomena and topics at the interface of syntax and pragmatics, such as dislocation, ellipsis, and parenthesis.
Instructor: Mark de Vries
Mark de Vries is an associate professor of theoretical linguistics at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), and teaches courses in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, morphology and comparative linguistics. He holds a PhD (with honors) from the University of Amsterdam, where he worked on the syntax of relative clauses, among other things. Since then, he has developed an interest in phenomena that extend the core sentence, such as coordination and ellipsis, parenthesis, dislocation, etc., and the interaction between syntax and other modules of the language system. From 2002 onwards, he has been principle investigator of various research projects on these topics.
