Cyclic transfer in the derivation of Complete Parenthetical Clauses

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show that some parentheticals are indeed syntactic orphans (cf. Haegeman 1988) and that this intuition can be formalized using tools independently motivated in linguistic theory. We concentrate on new data regarding clitic realization in what are commonly called Reduced Parenthetical Clauses (RPCs). We show that these constructions with clitic differ of their reduced counterpart in many aspects; crucially, they behave as root domains. Thus, we argue that they are derived independently from the host clause (in a parallel workspace) and their linear interpolation occurs during the Spell-Out process, assuming a dynamic version of cyclic Transfer (cf. Chomsky 2001, Uriagereka 1999).

Keywords

• parentheticals
• Transfer
• phases
• root clause
• linearization.