Specifying Coordination: An Investigation into the Syntax of Dislocation, Extraposition and Parenthesis

Coordination is a syntactic construction with a varying semantics. I argue that besides additive, disjunctive and more specialized kinds of coordination, there is another main type, namely one that can be characterized as specification. Grammatical configurations involving specifying coordination can be found at diverse levels of sentence structure. This provides an new perspective on a range of syntactic phenomena, such as apposition, parenthesis, left- and right-dislocation, and extraposition. Certainly, all these constructions are different, and they have been studied before in isolation - but they also have properties in common. I propose a basic typology in terms of four independent factors: restrictiveness, anchoring, backgrounding, and place of attachment. A common problem for the analysis of non-restrictive material is that it is a priori unclear how to incorporate such phrases and clauses in the host structure, since the syntactic relationship between the two cannot be expressed in terms of regular subordination, which is an automatic result of syntactic merger according to the standard view. Furthermore, several types of phrases or clauses can show up either in a dislocated position or as an intervening parenthesis, which is also unexpected from a traditional perspective. These problems can be solved by means of the particular mode of construal discussed in this chapter, specifying coordination, which is then divided into two kinds: i) restrictive specifying coordination, which can be used to explain extraposition, ii) non-restrictive (parenthetical) specifying coordination, which triggers a secondary message (a proposition if the parenthesis is anchored). Thus, it is shown that superficially very different syntactic constructions make use of the same abstract mechanisms.