Parenthetical verb constructions, fragment answers, and constituent modification

I argue that parenthetical verb clauses (PVCs) (Urmson in Mind 1952) such as John reckons, I confess, and she hopes always modify (that is, ‘have an interpretative effect upon’) propositions that may express illocutionary force. I illustrate that the apparent ability of PVCs to modify subclausal constituents is illusory, and that insights into how PVCs interact with the proposition that they modify are gained from exploring the syntactic mechanisms that maintain this illusion—the most important of which is the insight that constructions in which a PVC is observed modifying a subclausal constituent are best understood as fragment amalgams.

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