Parentheticals

This volume offers a unique collection of articles investigating the often neglected phenomenon of parentheticals, which are commonly seen as expressions interrupting the linear structure of a host utterance, but lacking a structural relation to it. The book provides an up-to-date introduction to the subject, as well as a range of research articles addressing questions including the syntactic link between parenthetical and frame utterance, the relation between syntactic and prosodic form, the usage and interpretation of parentheticals, and many more. It embraces research findings from different European languages (English, German, Dutch, Romance) and covers an array of forms of syntactic interpolations (from one-word parentheticals to clausal) and a range of methodologies, including empirical research, corpus research, and theoretical analyses. The collection underlines the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to a multi-faceted phenomenon such as parentheticals.

Andreea S. Calude, Univerisity of Reading, in Studies in Language Vol. 34:1 (2010):
The contributions made here go a long way not just in sharpening our understanding of PTs, but also in asking crucial (though admittedly, by no means new) questions of linguistics theory, such as, what does it mean for a construction to be syntactically integrated inside another; what precisely should we understand by “constituency” and what does it apply to; what are/should be the boundaries of a clause complex/ sentence, and others. To my mind, the success of the book lies not so much in being able to answer these questions, as it does in being able to raise them, and in doing so within the context of rigorous linguistic analysis. In asking these questions, the book provides the opportunity to move away from a limited, narrow-minded prescriptive view of language, where grammaticality is the yardstick which measures every phenomenon, to a more realistic view, where language is understood as an evolving cultural trait and as a tool developed for achieving specific communicative goals. In my view, this is a far more productive and useful endeavour.