The at-issue status of appositive relative clauses: evidence for a discourse-based approach

Abstract

The thesis contributes to the existing literature on at-issueness by focusing on the atissue status of appositive relative clauses (ARCs). It assumes a discourse-based model developed by Jasinskaja (2016), which accounts for at-issue status by making/nuse of general discourse mechanisms such as the Right Frontier Constraint (Polanyi, 1988). This approach yields many interesting predictions, one of which is that final discourse-structurally coordinate ARCs should express more at-issue behavior than final discourse-structurally subordinate ARCs. This prediction was tested in the current study. The experiment involved the manipulation of coordinating and subordinating rhetorical relations between the main clause and the final ARC, and it relied on the direct rejection test as a diagnostic for being at issue. The obtained results indicated that coordinate ARCs were targeted by rejections more frequently than subordinate ARCs, thus suggesting that the discourse-based approach is on the right track in describing the at-issue status of ARCs.