Parenthetical Constructions in the Parallel Architecture

Parentheticals, it is fair to say, are everywhere, and, as can easily be shown, they come in a huge variety of flavors. Two characteristics set them apart from ordinary arguments and adjuncts: they tend to show some freedom of position within their hosts, and they tend to be semantically opaque to scope of quantification, negation, and long-distance dependencies. This study demonstrates that parentheticals are independent pieces of language that are jammed into their host, subject to prosodic constraints, and they stand in some discourse relation to the host, serving as a side comment or as supporting material. But, crucially, parentheticals are ＂asyntactic＂ they are not syntactic constituents of their host.

The analysis is couched in terms of Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are independent but linked generative systems, and in which words and rules of grammar are encoded in a common format. In support of the asyntactic treatment of parentheticals, this study develops accounts of prosody and discourse structure, components of the grammar that are new to the Parallel Architecture.

The work presented here is innovative in several respects. First, it addresses and formalizes a wide range of parenthetical types, where most previous studies have dealt with only a limited selection. Second, it integrates the prosodic, syntactic, semantic, and discourse aspects of parentheticals, where most previous studies have dealt with only the prosody or only the semantics/discourse structure. Finally, many aspects of the analysis give reason to prefer the Parallel Architecture over other theories of grammatical structure.

Ray Jackendoff, Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Tufts University

Ray Jackendoff is Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Tufts University and a Research Affiliate in Brain and Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written widely on syntax, semantics, the architecture of grammar, the evolution of language, music cognition, and consciousness. He was the recipient of the 2003 Jean Nicod Prize and the 2014 David Rumelhart Prize, and has served as President of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He is the author of the OUP volumes Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (2002), Simpler Syntax (with Peter Culicover, 2005), Meaning and the Lexicon: The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010 (2010), A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning (2012), and The Texture of the Lexicon: Relational Morphology and the Parallel Architecture (with Jenny Audring, 2019).