On the shifted interpretation of appositives in embedded contexts
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[1] Universidad de Cádiz
Universidad de Cádiz
Cádiz, España
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- Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 255, 2021
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Appositives convey not-at-issue meaning and as such do not generally fall within the scope of operators. Recent research shows that they are, however, capable of shifting interpretation in embedded contexts (Amaral et al., 2007, Harris and Potts, 2009, Sæbø, 2011). This poses the question of whether, and to what extent, they act like presuppositions (i.e. not-at-issue meaning contributing to the semantics of embedded complements) and of how their content becomes intensionally relativized to the attitude holder of an embedding predicate. In this work, I will provide answers to these questions on the basis of new and old evidence from appositives occurring in embedded clausal complements. I propose that, syntactically, appositives are flexibly attached to different (embedded and matrix) sentence positions (Nowen, 2014, Schlenker, 2013). Meaning-wise, the application of the general interpretive requirement on appositives that they be eliminable (Schlenker, 2013) causes their low-attached instantiations to be possibly entailed in their local context. For embedded complements, this local context corresponds to the modal base of the quantification conveyed by the relevant attitude predication (Heim, 1992). This predicts the similarities and differences between them and presupposition triggers in embedded contexts. It also accounts for a wealth of data regarding the behavior of shifted appositives that are otherwise left unexplained.
