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Nominal Appositives in Grammar and Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Edgar Onea  and
Dennis Ott
Edgar Onea*
Affiliation:
University of Graz
Dennis Ott*
Affiliation:
University of the Basque Country and University of Ottawa
*
[edgar.onea-gaspar@uni-graz.at]
[dennis.ott@post.harvard.edu]
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Abstract

In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-structuring Potential Questions. We show how these two assumptions combine to yield a comprehensive theory of NAPs that captures their central syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and furthermore sheds light on the mechanisms that govern their linear interpolation.

Keywords

appositionquestionsellipsisparenthesissyntaxpragmaticsdiscourse

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 98 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 359 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We are indebted to Language editor Andries Coetzee and especially our associate editor Ezra Keshet for their patience and thoughtful feedback on our manuscript, which led to various significant improvements in the final product. Thanks also to three anonymous Language referees for their constructive commentary, as well as to those individuals and audiences mentioned in the acknowledgments of Ott 2016 and Onea 2016. Last but not least, we would like to thank Malte Zimmermann for making us aware of each other's work, thus kickstarting a collaboration that culminated in this paper. EO acknowledges financial support from the Austrian Science Fund (grant nr. I 4858). DO acknowledges financial support from the Basque Foundation for Science (Ikerbasque) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grant nr. 430-2018-00305).

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