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Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2014
Edited by Anita Auer and Björn Köhnlein
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 31] 2014
► pp. 39–52

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Parenthesis and presupposition in discourse

 | University of Groningen
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 10 November 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.31.04gri
Parentheses do not affect the semantic truth conditions of the host clause, but they do affect the discourse structure. We propose a maximally simple update system for the conversational context. Presuppositions are treated as past requests for the interlocutor’s consent. Parentheticals act like overt presuppositions unless they are linearly last in the utterance, in which case they can be taken as a current update request. This has consequences for the interlocutor’s ability to target a parenthetical message. We predict that sentence-final parentheses, and in particular attributive appositives, can be generically addressed, but medial ones only by a specific response. We also discuss why certain non-clausal parentheses, including identifying appositions, behave differently.
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Butschety, Madeleine
2022. The interpretation of the German additive particle auch (‘too, also’) in quantificational contexts. In Particles in German, English and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 224], ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo
McInnerney, Andrew
2022. Parenthetical niching: A third‐factor phonosyntactic analysis. Syntax 25:3 ► pp. 379 ff. DOI logo
Ott, Dennis & Mark de Vries
2016. Right-dislocation as deletion. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 34:2 ► pp. 641 ff. DOI logo

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