Appositive Relative Clauses and Their Co

In: Benz, Anton, Manfred Stede and Peter Kühnlein (eds.
), Constraints in Discourse 3: Representing and inferring discourse structure. 2012. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 207-
226. http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/pbns.223.09loo/details
Appositive Relative Clauses and their Competing Allostructures in English: an Information-
Packaging Approach1
Rudy Loock
University of Lille Nord de France & UMR STL 8163 CNRS
http://stl.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/sitespersonnels/loock/
rudy.loock@univ-lille3.fr
The goal of this paper is to compare appositive relative clauses (henceforth ARCs) to other structures that
convey the same information, in order to determine the morphosyntactic, semantic and above all pragmatic
factors conditioning the choice of structure. Alternatives to ARCs examined here include sentential
parentheticals, juxtaposed/coordinated independent clauses, adverbials or noun modifiers which, along with
ARCs, can be considered competing allostructures representing the different possible syntactic realizations of
the same informational, logico-semantic content. Setting register-related phenomena aside so that they do not
interfere with the results, the paper investigates several parameters like the hierarchization of the
informational contents (and discourse coherence as a whole), the (non) existence of an open proposition (as
defined in Prince 1986), the influence of a familiarity constraint (
In: Benz, Anton, Manfred Stede and Peter Kühnlein (eds.), Constraints in Discourse 3: Representing and inferring discourse structure. 2012. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 207-
(1) In the book the consul is portrayed as a rather sad man who drinks too much and marries an Indian girl out
of loneliness, who eventually leaves him.
(2) Olivier, who died in 1989 at the age of 82, co-founded the National theatre and was famous the world over
both as a stage performer and a film star.
(3) The singer, who believes she is a rock diva trapped in the body of a pop star, launched into her new single.
(4) Mr Blair, whose son attends a selective school, complained that too many comprehensives had a
paper is thus to compare Appositive Relative Clauses with other syntactic structures that convey the same
information in order to determine the morphosyntactic, semantic and specifically pragmatic factors
conditioning the choice of structure.
Following an information-packaging approach (Vallduví (1992, 1993); Lambrecht (1994), and Birner
and Ward (1998) among others), I investigate here alternatives to ARCs, such as juxtaposed/coordinated
independent clauses, nominal appositives, noun modifiers or sentential parentheticals. The information-
packaging framework aims to account for the differences between sentences that share the same logico-
semantic meaning (
readers
3. SEMANTICO-PRAGMATIC CONSTRAINTS
What I would like to focus on here is constraints that are linked with discourse organization in relation to
semantic and pragmatic factors such as information status, thus identifying the specific roles an ARC plays in
opposition to its competing allostructures. This will determine what can account for a speaker
3.1.2. The degree of familiarity

If independent clauses are a bad syntactic vehicle for conveying background information that does not
belong to the at-issue content, this is not the case of noun modifiers or nominal appositives (with or without an
RC):14
(10) Already, George Bush, the President of the United States, has signalled his intention to attend the
Olympics.
(11) Former president of the United States Bill Clinton will attend an international seminar on AIDS and
SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and deliver a lecture on global AIDS prevention and control
efforts, a seminar official said Friday.
(12) With communities in the Midwest still under water, Democrat Barack Obama on Saturday criticized
Republican John McCain for opposing federal spending on flood prevention programs and opened a new
debate in the White House race.
(13) Australian Open champ Djokovic, 21, said:
(12a) are infelicitous; (13a) questionable but imaginable and (14a) quite felicitous in spite of syntactic weight.
Statistics in Loock (2005) show that the more familiar the information (conveyed by the ARC or the
antecedent itself), the more likely the use of a noun modifier or a nominal appositive. 15
However, motivation based on familiarity is only a one-way constraint: it explains why an ARC is
infelicitous, but this does not mean that non-familiar relationships do require the use of an ARC. Consider
(15)-(16), as well as the relationships (15a)-(16a), which represent information that is unknown by (very)
probably most addressees (hearer new information). However, this does not exclude the use of a noun
premodifier or nominal appositive:
(15) Mr Miliband is scheduled to hold bilateral talks with Mr A. Raja, the Indian Environment Minister.
(16) No. 1 long-distance carrier AT&T will announce Thursday plans to sell Internet phone service to
consumers and to more businesses.
(15a) Mr A. Raja is the Indian Environment Minister.
(16a) AT&T is the No. 1 long-distance carrier.
The difference with examples (10), (11) or (12) is that the use of an ARC is possible:
(15c) Mr Miliband is scheduled to hold bilateral talks with Mr A. Raja, who is the Indian Environment
Minister.
(16c) AT&T, which is the No. 1 long-distance carrier, will announce Thursday plans to sell Internet phone
service to consumers and to more businesses.
It is therefore clear that the degree of familiarity between antecedent and information content in the ARC is a
constraint that plays a role in the choice between an ARC and one of its competing allostructures: the more
familiar the information, the harder it is to use of an ARC. However, this factor is not crucial when the
information is clearly new information, for which an ARC or a competing allostructure such as a nominal
appositive are both acceptable. Within the information packaging framework, the choice of structure specifies
whether the relation is given, unproblematic (nominal appositive, noun modifier) or needs to be explicitly
asserted (ARC), so as to fit properly in the hearer
(17a) #But George Bush, the president of the United States, has repeatedly asserted that he is the person in
charge of the country.
(18a) ?On Sunday, however, his wife announced that she is endorsing Democrat Senator Barack Obama.
In (17) the identificational link between G. Bush and president of the US needs in this context to be reasserted,
which triggers the use of the ARC. The explicit use of an anaphoric pronoun (who) followed by an
identificational be establishes the link explicitly, as opposed to a nominal appositive or a noun modifier.
In (18), the fact that Senator Obama is a Democrat does not represent information that serves only as a title to
introduce Obama in the discourse: although it is expressed through the use of an ARC, it represents important
information that needs to be stated explicitly, as it is in opposition with Schwarzenegger
that it was conquered by the Normans at some stage. Nothing else will be said about Sicily in the rest of the
article, hence the use of an ARC, the perfect vehicle for a temporary digression.
Should the speaker want to elaborate further, then he needs to resort to a structure that will promote it to the
Adverbials and ARCs thus convey the same informational content,18 the only difference being the
implicitness/explicitness of the discourse relation with the main clause. This might seem anecdotal and purely
stylistic. However, using an ARC and thus making the discourse relation between two clauses implicit through
the use of a relative pronoun (which in itself establishes no specific discourse relation), enables speakers to
say things without really saying them, as in the following example (see box 4 in the diagram,
In these two examples and their reformulations, the existence of a discourse-old link is obvious. However,
what differentiates the two sequences is that in (27), a presupposed OP exists (I did not manage to talk to X
that night, where X is the variable), whereas such a presupposed OP does not exist in example (28). As a
consequence, preposing is felicitous in (27) while the use an ARC is not; in (28) the exact opposite is true.
In information packaging terms, the use of an independent clause with preposing instead of an ARC provides
the instruction that an OP exists and that the variable represents the new information in the sentence and
should be stored as such in the addressees
LOOCK, Rudy. 2010b.

Appositive Relative Clauses and Their Co

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Appositive Relative Clauses and Their Co

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

In: Benz, Anton, Manfred Stede and Peter Kühnlein (eds.

3.1.2. The degree of familiarity

You might also like