Supplements without Bidimensionalism [2020 version]
Philippe Schlenker
February 2021 

In seminal work, Potts 2005 claimed that the behavior of 'supplements' – appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and nominals – offers a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a new semantic dimension. Focusing on ARCs, with data from English, French and German (Poschmann 2019), we explore an alternative to Potts’s bidimensional account in which (i) appositives may be syntactically attached with matrix scope, despite their appearance in embedded positions (McCawley 1981); (ii) they may also be syntactically attached within the scope of other operators, in which case they semantically interact with them; (iii) they are semantically conjoined with the rest of the sentence, but (iv) they give rise to non-trivial projection facts when they do not have matrix scope. In effect, our analysis accounts for most of the complexity of these data by positing a more articulated syntax and pragmatics, while keeping the semantics ‘lean’ and unidimensional. Note: a far longer and rather different manuscript was made available in 2013: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/repo/semanticsArchive/article/001255

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005206 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	supplements, appositives, non-restrictive relative clauses, bidimensionalism, parentheticals, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [May 2020]
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