Parentheticals in Underspecified Semantics: The Case of Evaluative Adverbs

Abstract

Previous studies of parenthetical expressions suffer from not making a clear distinction between prosodic, syntactic, semantic, and illocutionary properties. We distinguish parentheticality, the illocutionary property of providing a comment on the main content of the utterance, from incidentality, the grammatical status of an expression which is set apart prosodically from the rest of the sentence. While incidentality correlates with positional and scopal properties, parentheticality is an orthogonal property with no specific reflex in form. We then discuss the analysis of parentheticality at the syntax semantics interface, focusing on French evaluative adverbs such as bizarrement ‘oddly’. The issue is to model the fact that parenthetical content can appear syntactically embedded, while being interpreted outside of the main content on which it provides a comment. We show that Potts’s analysis [Potts, C. (2005). The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford University Press], while addressing many of the crucial properties of evaluatives, fails to account for their semantic embeddability. We propose an explicit analysis within an HPSG grammar, based on a modification of MRS (Copestake et al. (2006) Research on Language and Computation, 3, 281–332). In this framework, parenthetical content can be ‘set apart’ from the main semantic composition and interpreted at a higher level. The tight integration of syntax and semantics provided by HPSG allows us to introduce appropriate interface constraints on where this parenthetical content can scope.