AUTOR:     Olivier Bonami
AFILIACJA: CNRS/Sorbonne-Paris IV
TYTUŁ:     French parenthetical adverbs in HPSG

STRESZCZENIE:

So-called 'parentheticals' are usually believed to share two
properties: they have a special prosody and syntactic placement which
sets them apart from ordinary constituents, and they have a special
semantics, not being part of the main semantic content. Following
previous work by Bonami, Godard and Kampers-Manhe (in press), we will
show that the syntactic-prosodic property and the semantic-pragmatic
property are really independent.

In this talk I will focus on the semantic-pragmatic notion of
parentheticality, and in particular on parenthetical adverbs such as
evaluatives (e.g. 'fortunately') and speech-act adverbs (e.g.
'frankly'). On the basis of examples from French, I will show that
parenthetical adverbs do take scope, despite the fact that they do not
form part of the main semantic content. I will sketch an HPSG analysis
that makes sense of this fact by modelling explicitly the respective
role of parenthetical and non-parenthetical content in dialogue, on
the basis of Ginzburg (to appear).

References

Olivier Bonami, Daniele Godard et Brigitte Kampers-Manhe. In press. 
Adverb Classification. In F. Corblin et H. de Swart (eds), Handbook of 
French Semantics. Stanford : CSLI Publications. 
http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/fr/Bonami/2-BGK-CSLI04.pdf

Jonathan Ginzburg. To appear. A semantics for interaction in dialogue. 
Stanford: CSLI Publications and Chicago: the University of Chicago 
Press. Draft chapters available at
http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/ginzburg/papers.html