Nominal appositives in grammar and discourse

Abstract

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.