Supplementary As-clauses constitute a complex phenomenon due to the prosodic, syntactic, and semantic properties that may be ascribed to their parenthetical nature. While recent works such as Potts (2002) have put forth an in-depth examination of the phenomenon, demonstrating that the construction can be treated as a kind of adverbial phrase with a particular semantic interpretation as a parenthetical expression, this paper points out some problems with the analyses, especially with respect to the niching property and semantic interpretations with ignored negation or operators. The current work instead proposes a constraint-based analysis of the construction that exploits the analytical advantage of linearized Word Order Domain and Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). In this paper, the niching property is dealt with by a Domain-based analysis so that the semantic interpretation of As-clauses is not directly determined by the niched position. Furthermore, the underspecified semantic representations within MRS provide a non-structure-based interpretation of the gap involved in an As-clause with a partial reference to main clause meaning.
1. Introduction
2. Properties of Supplementary As-Clauses
3. Previous Approaches
4. A Proposal
5. Concluding Remarks