Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English
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Rudy Loock
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to compare appositive relative clauses (henceforth ARCs) to other structures that convey the same information, in order to determine the morphosyntactic, semantic and above all pragmatic factors conditioning the choice of structure. Alternatives to ARCs examined here include sentential parentheticals, juxtaposed/coordinated independent clauses, adverbials or noun modifiers which, along with ARCs, can be considered competing allostructures representing the different possible syntactic realizations of the same informational, logico-semantic content. Setting register-related phenomena aside so that they do not interfere with the results, the paper investigates several parameters like the hierarchization of the informational contents (and discourse coherence as a whole), the (non) existence of an open proposition (as defined in Prince 1986), the influence of a familiarity constraint (‘fame effect’) among others as constraints accounting for the choice of structure. The identified constraints will be paralleled with the discourse functions of ARCs defined in previous research, justifying the suggested typology.
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to compare appositive relative clauses (henceforth ARCs) to other structures that convey the same information, in order to determine the morphosyntactic, semantic and above all pragmatic factors conditioning the choice of structure. Alternatives to ARCs examined here include sentential parentheticals, juxtaposed/coordinated independent clauses, adverbials or noun modifiers which, along with ARCs, can be considered competing allostructures representing the different possible syntactic realizations of the same informational, logico-semantic content. Setting register-related phenomena aside so that they do not interfere with the results, the paper investigates several parameters like the hierarchization of the informational contents (and discourse coherence as a whole), the (non) existence of an open proposition (as defined in Prince 1986), the influence of a familiarity constraint (‘fame effect’) among others as constraints accounting for the choice of structure. The identified constraints will be paralleled with the discourse functions of ARCs defined in previous research, justifying the suggested typology.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
- Processing narrative texts 17
- Through narrative planning towards the preverbal message 45
- Bridges between events 77
- The semantics of French continuative rises in SDRT 109
- Coherence structure and lexical cohesion in expository and persuasive texts 137
- Complex connectives in German 165
- Differential properties of three discourse connectives in Turkish 183
- Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English 207
- Index 227
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
- Processing narrative texts 17
- Through narrative planning towards the preverbal message 45
- Bridges between events 77
- The semantics of French continuative rises in SDRT 109
- Coherence structure and lexical cohesion in expository and persuasive texts 137
- Complex connectives in German 165
- Differential properties of three discourse connectives in Turkish 183
- Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English 207
- Index 227
