Non-restrictive relative clauses, ellipsis and anaphora

Abstract

Non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs) can modify constituents which undergo ˋpragmatic enrichment' when they appear in answers to questions. For example, in an interchange like: ˋA: What did Jo think? B: That you should say nothing, which is surprising.' What B says is surprising is that ˋJo thinks ...' On the face of it, this might seem problematic for approaches to NRRCs which assume ˋsyntactic integration' and to support an ˋorphan' analysis, where NRRCs are combined with purely conceptual representations. In this paper we examine a range of elliptical and anaphoric phenomena, and show that this conclusion is misplaced. In fact, the phenomena argue strongly in favour of a syntactically integrated analysis.