Non-local attachment of clauses
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Non-local attachment of clauses Evidence from ASL Philippe Schlenker1,2,3
Received: 4 February 2019 / Accepted: 10 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract We argue that some parenthetical-like clauses in ASL can take both intermediate and maximally wide scope outside of if-clauses and attitude verbs. Specifically, we investigate embedded coordinations, of the form . . . SAY [IF Clause-1 Clause-2 PLUS Clause-3, . . . ], and argue that Clause-2 may in some cases be interpreted with wide and intermediate scope (above SAY, or between SAY and IF). The key to our paradigm is that we mark the scope of IF and SAY with non-manual markers (Brow Raise and/or Role Shift). By exempting Clause-2 from these non-manuals, we force it to outscope the relevant operator, including when it might be expected to create a syntactic island. Wide scope replicates the behavior of parentheticals and appositives in other languages. Intermediate scope is particularly interesting because it mirrors with full clauses the behavior predicted by some theories for some English appositives (Schlenker 2010, to appear a). The ASL data might thus lend support to the existence of a mechanism of high attachment in situ (McCawley 1981, 1998). Alternatives in terms of island-escaping covert movement or in situ indexing face significant challenges. Grant acknowledgments: The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement N°324115–FRONTSEM (PI: Schlenker), and also under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (ERC grant agreement No 788077, Orisem, PI: Schlenker). Research was conducted at Institut d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL Research University. Institut d’Etudes Cognitives is supported by grant FrontCog ANR-17-EURE-0017. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-020-09486-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
B P. Schlenker 1
Institut Jean-Nicod (ENS – EHESS – CNRS) – Département d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
2
PSL Research University, Paris, France
3
New York University, New York, USA
P. Schlenker
Keywords Non-manuals · Appositives · Parentheticals · Supplements · Scope · Bidimensionalism
1 Introduction 1.1 High attachment of parentheticals and appositives? McCawley (1981, 1998) proposed that English appositive relative clauses are attached at the matrix level despite being apparently embedded.1 His proposal is illustrated in (1), which gives rise to a discontinuous constituent sold a violin to Itzhak Perlman (McCawley’s analysis countenanced ternary branching for ditransitive verbs; this assumption is immaterial to the issue at hand). (1)
McCawley motivated his proposal by patterns of ellipsis resolution, as in (2): (2)
John sold a violin, which had once belonged to Nathan Milstein, to Itzhak Perlman, and Mary did too.
As McCa
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