NRR: Semantic, pragmatic and prosodic aspects of non-restrictive relative clauses

Head of the project: Prof. Dr. Caroline Féry
Prof. Dr. Thomas Ede Zimmermann
 
Staff: Julia Biskupek
Dr. Claudia Poschmann

Short description:

The aim of this project is to develop functional and prosodic analyses of non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs) in German, French and English.

NRRCs, unlike their restrictive relative clause counterparts, add propositional information which usually does not influence the interpretation of its associated syntactic structure, and furthermore does not impinge on primary discourse functions. From these considerations arises a series of questions concerning the grammatical analysis of NRRS and the correlation between their syntactic position and their interpretation. Until recently it has not been obvious which functional types have to be distinguished, nor how NRRS are anaphorically and discursively linked to the matrix clause. This project will approach these issues from the perspective of discourse embedding, employing various theoretical and empirical methods of semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic analysis.

Detailed project description as pdf-file (German)