On the grammatical and discourse integration of appositive expressions

This research project is about the linguistic properties of so-called appositive expressions, that is, expressions like my sister in such strings as: Mary, my sister, lives in the Netherlands. At an intuitive level, the appositive expression my sister appears to be less linguistically integrated than, say, the pronominal I. Or to put it differently, it appears to display a greater degree of disconnectedness with respect to the clause in which it is "niched".

The aim of this project is to further our understanding of the linguistic properties of (bare, i.e. overtly non-clausal) appositive expressions by providing a systematic linguistic description of this construction type. The issue of (dis)integration/(dis)connectedness will be taken as as a central research question. Emphasis will be laid on the (morpho)syntactic-semantic integration of appositive expressions. Thus, at a more general level, the following two research questions can be formulated: (i) What is the syntactic integration of appositive expressions? (ii) What is the semantic integration of appositive expressions? And, of course, these two question lead to the related question: (iii) What is the relation between syntactic and semantic integration?

The phenomenon of apposition is what could be called a "borderline" phenomenon: it appears to function at the borderline of syntax and discourse. It does not seem to be fully integrated at the level of the containing clause (cf. e.g. its phonetic autonomy), nor does it function as an autonomous element in a sequence of clauses forming a discourse unit. The study of the phenomenon of apposition thus provides insight into the way linguistic knowledge is organized.

If appositive expressions are syntactically integrated in the larger, encompassing syntactic structure (say, via Merge), one would expect them to display integrated/connected behavior as well with respect to those interpretive phenomena that are standardly assumed to be sensitive to structural conditions like c-command. Thus, one could raise the following research question: To what extent are appositive phrases (APP) involved in sentence grammar interpretive phenomena?

One of the aims of this project will be to investigate the accessibility of APP-internal elements for sentence-level interpretive dependencies, and more in particular to give an answer to the ambiguous behavior of the APP (i.e. opacity for certain interpretive dependencies, but opacity for others). The range of interpretive phenomena to be considered will include among others: (i) sloppy identity readings (is the APP part of the sloppy reading?); (ii) negative polarity licensing; (iii) crossover phenomena; (iv) reflexive binding. As a part of this search for the semantic integration of the APP-expression, the question needs to be answered to what extent discourse factors are responsible for the non-standard degrees of interpretive integration property to appositives? It is here where the notion of Speaker-orientation might come into play: APPs typically represent the speaker's point of view.