Spoken parenthetical clauses in English

This article investigates English parenthetical clauses, a category which subsumes a wide range of forms and generally lacks a clear definition in the literature. The aim of the study is to systematise the class of parenthetical clauses with a view to highlighting its internal stratification and establishing an operational definition. For methodological reasons this is done with the help of purely syntactic criteria, viz. clausal form and lack of syntactic attachment as two necessary features, and positional flexibility as an additional feature of core members of the class. These criteria allow for the delimitation of parenthetical clauses from related categories, such as interrogative tags, discourse markers, anacolutha, and provide for a clear internal structure of the class in the form of a taxonomy of subtypes.