Mark de Vries

University of Groningen | RUG · Department of General Linguistics

While the left clausal periphery has been in the center of attention of syntactic theory since the 1970s, the right periphery remains comparatively ill-understood. The goal of this paper is to rectify this situation. We argue that Germanic right-dislocation constructions are composed of two juxtaposed clauses, the dislocated peripheral XP being a r...

Parentheses do not affect the semantic truth conditions of the host clause, but they do affect the discourse structure. We propose a maximally simple update system for the conversational context. Presuppositions are treated as past requests for the interlocutor’s consent. Parentheticals act like overt presuppositions unless they are linearly last i...

This article discusses the nature of the operation Merge, and the possibility of unconventional mergers, with some attention to the issue of representation. Regular Merge has three possible effects, depending on the input. Next to 'first-time' merge, there are both 'internal' and 'external' re merge. The last creates a temporary doubly-rooted struc...

How do people understand figurative speech in a foreign language? What strategies do they use? By means of an online questionnaire, this study investigated to what extent contextual information and transfer play a role in the interpretation of idioms in a second language, controlling for familiarity. Sixty-one native speakers of Dutch were asked to...

In Griffiths and De Vries 2013 (G&dV), we offer an argument in favor of treating appositive relative clauses (ARCs) as syntactically integrated into their hosts, an argument that revolves around the distribution of ARCs in clausal ellipsis environments. In a reply, Ott (2016) counters this specific argument, rejects the more general integration ana...

Across‐the‐Board (ATB) phenomena in linguistics, can generally be defined as one‐to‐many correspondences. Standard examples involve wh ‐extraction out of two or more coordinated clauses or phrases at once, as in Which teacher did John like _ and Sue hate _? Such configurations violate an otherwise valid bi‐uniqueness principle: an antecedent licens...

GuglielmoCinque, Typological studies: Word order and relative clauses (Routledge Leading Linguists). New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. x+390. - Volume 50 Issue 2 - Mark de Vries

Right-dislocation constructions, including backgrounding and specificational afterthoughts, are subject to various limitations. Dislocated phrases themselves are islands for extraction. Moreover, there are proximity effects between dislocated phrases and their correlate in the host clause. The main effect reduces to the regular constraints on A-bar...

Merger of a phrase for the second time (i.e. remerge) leads to structure sharing, which can be represented by a multidominance graph. Depending on the configuration, this corresponds to what is traditionally considered either regular movement or sideward sharing. These two types of remerge exhibit somewhat different properties. Basic Minimalist pri...

Relative clauses are subordinate clausal modifiers. Semantically, they contain a variable that is somehow related to the anchoring phrase (usually a so-called head noun). Across and within different languages, we find a host of different construction types falling under the general label of relative clause. These can be restrictive or nonrestrictiv...

The goal of this squib is to explain an intriguing data set involving appositives and fragment answers, thereby providing support for the idea that appositives, and by extension parentheses more generally, are related to the host clause in syntax, via parenthetical coordination. Appositives include appositions and appositive relative clauses (ARCs)...

We propose to analyze right-dislocation constructions in terms of clausal coordination, coupled with ellipsis. While neither rightward movement nor base-generation of backgrounded and afterthought phrases is descriptively accurate, we show that the facts follow straightforwardly on an analysis that takes the dislocated phrase to be the surface remn...

Modifiers and several other types of constituents can be right-extraposed across the right sentence bracket (the verbal pole) in Dutch. This article discusses what the conditions on such configurations are, how extraposed phrases can be distinguished from dislocated phrases, and how extraposition can be analyzed from a formal syntactic perspective....

This article discusses a number of complex appositive constructions, and compares them to regular non-restrictive relative clauses and appositions in some Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. Special attention is paid to the existence of so-called additional head NPs, and additional pronouns and determiners in appositive constructions. It is arg...

This article centers around two questions: What is the relation between movement and structure sharing, and how can complex syntactic structures be linearized? It is shown that regular movement involves internal remerge, and sharing or ‘sideward movement’ external remerge. Without ad hoc restric-tions on the input, both options follow from Merge. T...

This article discusses the information-structural status and the syntax of left and right dislocation constructions in Dutch. Four orthogonal information-structural features are proposed, and their distribution is systematically investigated. Furthermore, it is argued that hanging topic left dislocation, back-grounding right dislocation and afterth...

This article centers around two questions: (i) what is the relation between movement and structure sharing?, and (ii) how can complex syntactic structures be linearized? It is shown that regular movement involves internal remerge, and sharing or 'sideward movement' external remerge. Without ad hoc restrictions on the input, both options follow from...

Extraposition and right node raising (RNR) can interact in two ways: from a descriptive point of view, the result of each can be used as input for the other. Embedding of the former process or configuration inside the latter explains apparent violations of the right periphery condition associated with RNR. The reverse leads to right-peripheral mate...

Coordination is a syntactic construction with a varying semantics. I argue that besides additive, disjunctive and more specialized kinds of coordination, there is another main type, namely one that can be characterized as specification. Grammatical configurations involving specifying coordination can be found at diverse levels of sentence structure...

I argue that syntactic structure encodes three types of asymmetries. The first corresponds to the asymmetry between mother and daughters nodes that is called dominance, that is, syntactic hierarchy. The second is the selectional asymmetry between sister nodes, which is translated into the precedence relation in the phonological component. The third...

In linguistics, it is quite common to use tree diagrams for immediate constituent analysis of sentences. Traditionally, these trees are binary and two-dimensional. However, phenomena such as coordination and right node raising, have led to the view that a simple hierarchical approach of sentences is inadequate: some linguistic phenomena rather seem...

I argue that syntactic structure encodes three types of asymmetries. The first corresponds to the asymmetry between mother and daughters nodes that is called dominance, that is, syntactic hierarchy. The second is the selectional asymmetry between sister nodes, which is translated into the precedence relation in the phonological component. The third...

  The recursive phenomenon of direct speech (quotation) comes in many different forms, and it is arguably an important and widely used ingredient of both spoken and written language. This article builds on (and provides indirect support for) the idea that quotations are to be defined pragmatically as (quasi-)linguistic demonstrations. Such a perspe...

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Appositive relative clauses differ in some essential respects from restrictive relative clauses. I argue that appositive relatives and appositions can be put together as a third class of coordination denoting specification. Thus, an appositive relative is a specifying conjunct to the visible antecedent. It is a semifree relative with a pronominal h...

This article discusses the phenomenon of pied-piping in restrictive relative clauses in the Germanic languages Dutch, German, and English. Since it concerns possessive relatives primarily, an integrated approach to the syntax of relativization and attributive possession is sought for. Possessive relatives directly reflect the three basic types of a...

  This article discusses the syntax of coordinate structures, in particular the status of initial coordinators, multiple coordination, and the asymmetries between conjuncts with respect to c-command relations. The idea of coordinators as heads – hence the CoP – is endorsed, but not for initial coordinators; rather they figure in a separate ‘distrib...

This article discusses linguistic universals concerning relative clause constructions, which are relatively well-studied, both by typologists and theoreticians. It turns out that several universal statements formulated in the past—e.g., in Downing's (1978) seminal work— must be weakened to tendencies or less on the basis of present knowledge. Follo...

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Progovac (1997) they are right-adjoined to an abstract DP; in Grootveld (1994) they are behind each other; in Van der Heijden (1999) they are embedded in an agreement phrase. However, I will argue that t he original assumption is wrong: initial coordinators are not regular conjunctions (cf. Johannessen 1998, Hendriks & Zwart 2001, Hendriks 2002, Br...