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The syntax, pragmatics, and prosody of parenthetical what

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2006

NICOLE DEHÉ  and
YORDANKA KAVALOVA
NICOLE DEHÉ
Affiliation:
Freie Universität Berlin, Department of English Language, Literature and Culture, Gosslerstr 2-4, 14195 Berlin, [email protected]
YORDANKA KAVALOVA
Affiliation:
Survey of English Usage, Department of English Language and Literature, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT [email protected]
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Abstract

This article contributes to the discussion of parentheticals. It focuses on a specific one-word parenthetical in English, namely what. To account for its distributional behaviour we offer a multifaceted approach. Specifically, our study explains why parenthetical what strongly prefers the position immediately preceding a cardinal number. In this respect, we identify three key questions which can only be answered collectively by looking into its syntactic properties, semantic and pragmatic motivation, and prosodic characteristics. While syntax accounts for parenthetical what being attached to the node that dominates the number, pragmatics takes care of its position immediately preceding the number, and prosody explains the unacceptability of what in sentence-initial position. In this way, this study supports the idea that to fully account for the behaviour of parenthetical structures, the phenomenon should not be restricted to a single component of the grammar. The strength of the present approach also lies in the authenticity and amount of data we used.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , November 2006 , pp. 289 - 320
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2006

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1st International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English at the University of Edinburgh in June 2005. We would like to thank the audience there for the lively discussion. Parts of this paper were also presented at the University of Konstanz in May 2005 and the University of Göttingen in July 2005 by Nicole Dehé. We are grateful to the audiences there for discussion and comments. Furthermore, we would like to thank the following people who have contributed in various ways to the work presented here: Bas Aarts, Carolyn Biraben, Diane Blakemore, Dirk Bury, Ray Jackendoff, Ad Neeleman, Rosa Vega-Moreno, and Anne Wichmann, as well as one anonymous reviewer for ELL. The present work was supported by DFG grant DE 876/1-1 to Nicole Dehé, as well as an ORS grant and a Stern scholarship from the University of London to Yordanka Kavalova.