Divisions of labour: The analysis of parentheticals

The term ‘parenthetical’ covers a disparate range of phenomena only some of which have been regarded as falling within the domain of syntax. However, it has been argued by Haegeman (1988) that adverbial parenthetical clauses, which have been treated by other writers as syntactic phenomena, must be analyzed as syntactic orphans that are integrated into the utterance at the level of utterance interpretation. If this approach is right, then it would raise the question of how we could justify a distinction between grammatical parentheticals and pragmatic or discourse parentheticals. Recently, however, Potts (2002, 2005) has argued against this approach in favour of an integrated syntax analysis. In this approach the ‘otherness’ of parentheticals is captured in semantic terms by treating them as contributing conventional implicatures. In this paper, I examine the difference between these approaches in the light of adverbial parenthetical clauses whose relationship with their hosts depends on pragmatically constrained inference, and show how such examples underline two very different conceptions of the distinction between grammar and pragmatics.