Non-restrictive relative clauses, ellipsis and anaphora

Abstract

Non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs) can modify constituents which undergo `pragmatic enrichment' when they appear in answers to questions. For example, in an interchange like: `A: What did Jo think? B: That you should say nothing, which is surprising.' What B says is surprising is that `Jo thinks ...' On the face of it, this might seem problematic for approaches to NRRCs which assume `syntactic integration' and to support an `orphan' 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.