The syntax and semantics of As-parentheticals

This paper is a detailed investigation of the syntax and semantics of a single type of cross-linguistically commonparenthetical expression, here dubbed As-parentheticals (e.g., Ames, as you know, was aspy). I show that a treatment of such clauses as adverbial modifiers combines with a motivated semantic analysisto account for a wide range of ambiguities concerning negation in particular, but also tense, modal, and adverbialoperators. I provide a principled explanation for the impossibility of variable binding into, and extractionfrom, As-parentheticals, and argue that this construction yields novel support forthe view (of Ladusaw 1992, and others) that negative DPs like no one are actually non-negated indefinites licensed by anabstract, clause-level negation. Overall, the analysis shows that parentheticals, in addition to being a richsource of puzzles in their own right, provide a useful probe into clause structure in general.