Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English

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 (‘fame effect’) among others as constraints accounting for the choice of structure. The identified constraints will be paralleled with the discourse functions of ARCs defined in previous research, justifying the suggested typology.