Supplemental update

Abstract

Supplements have often been characterized as inert with respect to other content. But under closer scrutiny, the data shows that supplements can take scope and participate in anaphoric links, undermining multidimensional accounts of them. I argue that the core empirical facts pertaining to supplements, including projection, can in many cases be accounted for by more general, independently motivated factors such as anaphora resolution in discourse and quantifier scope preferences. Importantly, supplement projection is decoupled from at-issueness, with projection arising instead as an epiphenomenon of various external influences.The account is formalized in a dynamic, compositional, and unidimensional semantics that allows anaphoric links to and from supplement content. Since supplements are modeled as a kind of quantifier phrase modifier, scope interactions with semantic operators are captured without further stipulation. When a supplement takes widest scope, it constitutes a separate at-issue proposal, enabling both supplement projection and (non)deniability. The formal machinery requires no additional rules or representation layers except for the dynamic meaning of the comma intonation, which demarcates a supplement from its surrounding content.

Attachment in Syntax and Discourse: Towards an explanation for the flexible scope of non-restrictive relative clauses

“…Apart from tense, the examples differ, for instance, in the presence/absence of the anaphoric adverbial then. A straightforward explanation, suggested by Martin (2016), relates the local interpretation in (2) to the need to bind the anaphoric adverbial then, which only finds an appropriate antecedent (the event of Max calling the dean) in the scope of the conditional-a solution parallel to van der Sandt's (1992) trapping of presuppositions. However, one should then expect that the pronoun him in (6), which can only be bound by someone under if, should also be able to trap the NRC.…”