At-issue Proposals and Appositive Impositions in Discourse

Abstract

Potts (2005) and many subsequent works have argued that the semantic content of appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses, e.g., the underlined material in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited her in the hospital, must be in some way separate from the content of the rest of the sentence, i.e., from at-issue content. At the same time, there is mounting evidence from various anaphoric processes that the two kinds of content must be integrated into a single, incrementally evolving semantic representation. The challenge is how to reconcile this informational separation with these pervasive anaphoric connections. We propose a dynamic semantic account that accomplishes this by taking appositive and at-issue content to involve two different kinds of updates to the Context Set (CS). Treating the context set as a distinguished propositional variable, p cs , we argue that appositives directly impose their content on the CS by eliminating possible values assigned to p cs. In contrast, we treat at-issue assertions as introducing a new propositional dref and proposing that p cs be updated with its content, subject to addressee's response. In addition to capturing the behavior of appositives in discourse, we show that the account can be extended to capture the projection of appositive content past various sentential operators.

Supplemental update

“…The account that is probably most similar to this one is due to AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson (2015), who model supplements unidimensionally, The divergence in predictions between AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson's account and this one, which I argue is more empirically adequate, comes down to the following fundamental conceptual difference: for AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson, a supplement intervenes upon its anchor to force widest scope; the account presented here inverts this relationship, so that a supplement's scope is determined by its anchor's scope. The AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson account's inability to correctly model supplements in narrow-scope position stems from its prohibition on the interaction between supplements and scope-taking operators.…”

“…(Amaral, Roberts & Smith 2007: 741, (37)) Here, the iterative adverb too is licensed by John's having a motorcycle, information that arises from within the supplement's apposition. Ellipsis can also take place between supplement and nonsupplement content, as Giorgolo & Asudeh (2012) and AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson (2015) show.…”

“…Nouwen (2014) proposes that competing representations of supplements are ranked so that a wider-scope representation is always preferred to a narrower-scope one. In a similar vein, AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson (2015) model supplements as updating the discourse context directly, using a different update mode from the proposal generated by the surrounding main clause content. For AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson, a supplement forces its anchor to always take widest scope, and apparent exceptions such as (7), (10), or (15) If a professor, a famous one, publishes a book, he will make a lot of money.…”

“…The approach presented here also differs significantly from the unidimensional accounts due to Kubota & Uegaki (2009), AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson (2010, Koev (2012Koev ( , 2014 and Murray (2014) for the same reason, namely that they do not countenance a notion of supplement scope. Additionally, only some of these previous accounts (Giorgolo & Asudeh 2012, Martin 2013, Koev 2014, Murray 2014, AnderBois, Brasoveanu & Henderson 2015 give an explicit model of how supplements participate in anaphoric interactions.…”

Discourse Coherence and Relativization in Korean

“…Another test is provided in (34). The idea is that the truth of at-issue content can be subject to negotiation by other participants of the conversation, whereas CI content cannot (McCready 2010;AnderBois et al 2015). In (34) B's response to A calls into question the truth of the proposition that the apples were on the plate.…”