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Title:
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Appositives at the Interface
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Author:
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Francesca Del Gobbo
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of California, Irvine
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2003
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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Chinese, Mandarin
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Director(s):
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Naoki Fukui
Y.-H. Li
C.T. James Huang
Utpal Lahiri
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Abstract:
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Most properties of appositive relatives force us to treat them as separate from their antecedent and from the matrix clause; at the same time other properties (adjacency requirement, feature matching) call for a structure in which, at least at some level, the appositive relative and its antecedent do form a constituent. This dissertation provides a solution to the above paradox. I claim that appositives are generated as adjuncts of their 'heads', but they separate from them in order to be properly interpreted. Following Sells (1985a,b) and Demirdache (1991), I propose that the appositive relative pronoun is E-type. I adopt an approach to E-type anaphora that is both grammatical (Heim 1990) and pragmatic (Cooper 1979, Heim and Kratzer 1998). If the 'head' of the relative is definite, the pronoun is replaced at LF by a copy of the 'head' only if the latter precedes the relative. If the 'head' is not definite, the appositive is ‘Restructured’ into an independent sentence before Spell-Out (becoming the sister of the matrix clause under a Text node) only if the appositive occurs sentence-finally. At LF, in this representation, the pronoun can correctly receive the E-type interpretation following Heim’s (1990) rule. In both cases, at the level of discourse, the appositive is an independent sentence, sister of the matrix and daughter of a Text node (see Heim's (1982) Text Formation).
This theory predicts that prenominal relatives cannot be appositive. To test this prediction, a substantial part of the dissertation is devoted to the analysis of Chinese relatives.
Chapter 1 presents Aoun and Li's (2003) approach to relativization in Chinese. The authors show that Chinese relatives can only be analyzed in terms of adjunction structure, and 'head'-raising or operator movement. In order to economize on the strategies available, I slightly modify and adopt Sauerland's (1998) matching analysis. Throughout the dissertation, relatives are analyzed as adjunction structures, derived through operator movement (i.e. matching).
In Chapter 2 I show that Chinese relatives can only be restrictive. This is striking, as Chao (1968) and Hashimoto (1971) – among others – maintain that a relative in Chinese is interpreted as appositive if it follows a demonstrative, but as restrictive if it precedes it. My evidence comes from tests that use well-known properties that distinguish appositives from restrictives. Chinese relatives modifying pronouns and proper names also do not behave as appositives. This is shown with binding and long-distance anaphora facts, and with tests using sentential adverbs of modification and the difference between presupposition and backgrounded assertion.
In Chapter 3 I address the issue of an appropriate semantics for appositives. The proposed mechanism of interpretation of appositive relatives predicts that appositives can modify quantified 'heads', as long as they occur in sentence-final position. New data is presented to show that such prediction is fulfilled.
As for the semantics of Chinese relatives modifying proper names and pronouns, I adopt two strategies. For a subset of the relevant cases, I propose that in Chinese when a proper name or pronoun is combined with a restrictive relative, the nominal is type-shifted to a predicate of type (a particular 'stage' of the individual). For those cases that are resistant to a 'stage' level interpretation, I adopt the operation Restrict (Chung and Ladusaw, 2003).
The remainder of the dissertation is devoted to a comparison with alternative accounts of apposition and to illustrate how an approach to apposition as E-type anaphora can explain the differences between restrictives and appositives.
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