Parenthetical Meaning

This book investigates the semantics and pragmatics of a representative sample of parenthetical constructions. Todor Koev argues that these constructions fall into two major classes: pure and impure. Pure parentheticals comment on some part of the descriptive content of the root sentence but are otherwise relatively independent of it. Impure parentheticals modify components of the illocutionary force and affect the felicity or the truth of the root sentence. The book studies parentheticals from three theoretical viewpoints: illocutionary effects, scopal properties, and discourse status. It establishes and explicates the notion of parenthetical meaning in a formally precise and predictive dynamic-semantic model. As a result, parentheticality is brought to bear on linguistic phenomena such as entailment and presupposition, binding and anaphora, evidentiality and modality, illocutionary force, and polarity.

Todor Koev, Emmy Noether Fellow, Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz

Todor Koev is Emmy Noether Fellow at the University of Konstanz. He obtained his PhD in Linguistics from Rutgers University in 2013, after which he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Stuttgart and a Visiting Scholar at MIT. His work has been published in journals such as Linguistics
and Philosophy and Journal of Semantics.