Appositives at the interface.

摘要

Appositive relative clauses have contradictory properties. For certain aspects they seem to be separate from their antecedent and from the matrix clause; for others they seem to form a constituent with their antecedent. This dissertation provides a solution to the described paradox.; Following Sells (1985a,b) and Demirdache (1991), I claim that appositives are an instance of E-type anaphora. I adopt an approach to E-type anaphora that is both grammatical (Heim 1990) and pragmatic (Cooper 1979, Heim and Kratzer 1998). In order to account for the properties of appositive relative clauses, we need to represent them as nominal modifiers in syntax and as independent sentences at the level of discourse. This is obtained by postulating a rule for the interpretation of the appositive relative pronoun as an E-type pronoun (the PRONOUN RULE) and a rule that transforms the appositive relative clause into a matrix clause under a Text node (the RESTRUCTURING RULE). The Restructuring Rule modifies the hierarchical structure of a sentence without altering its linear order and applies before Spell-Out. Its LF counterpart is TEXT FORMATION (see Heim 1982). The interaction of the postulated rules makes the following predictions: No prenominal relatives can be interpreted as appositive; and appositive relative clauses can modify quantified ‘heads’, as long as they occur in sentence-final position. These predictions are fulfilled by facts observed both in Chinese and in English.; Finally, I provide an explanation for the availability of restrictive relative clauses modifying referential names in Chinese. In most cases, these relatives are interpreted as modifying not the individual denoted by the proper name or the pronoun, but ‘stages’ of it. Following Paul (1994), I assume that the ‘stage’ of an individual is interpreted as a property of the same. The relative clause combines with the ‘stage’ by Intersective Predicate Modification. For those cases that are resistant to a ‘stage’ interpretation, I adopt the nonsaturating operation Restrict (Chung and Ladusaw, to appear) by allowing it to apply to nominals of type e.; In sum, my theory provides a formal tool for characterizing appositive relative clauses as a phenomenon spanning between syntax, semantics and discourse.