Typical utterances convey both foregrounded information and information that is part of the assumed background. To further explore this distinction, we focused on sentences that consist of a main clause and an appositive relative clause (ARC), such as: ‘My friend Sophie, who is a classical violinist, performed a piece by Mozart.’ It is generally assumed that main clauses express “at-issue” content, whereas ARCs carry background information in virtue of their syntactic status as relative clauses. We hypothesized that ARC contents can in certain cases become foregrounded, based on processing constraints and semantics. To test the role of processing constraints, we manipulated whether the ARC was sentence-medial or -final. We hypothesized that a recency effect in processing could foreground sentence-final ARCs. To test the role of semantics, we varied whether the ARC described a state (e.g., ‘is a classical violinist’) or an event (e.g., ‘performed a piece by Mozart’). We hypothesized that eventive ARCs would be foregrounded, because events are more salient than states. Two web-based experiments examined the impact of these factors on people’s judgements about ARC information status. In our first experiment, following Syrett and Koev (2015), participants saw mini dialogues between two speakers, where Speaker A utters a sentence like the example above and Speaker B responds ‘No, that is not true’. Participants indicated whether they thought Speaker B denied the main clause or the ARC.  There were twenty-four experimental dialogues plus thirty-six fillers designed to mask the experimental manipulation. Each participant saw each experimental item in only one of the four conditions, but across the experiment saw items in all conditions. Our analyses show that both factors influence what clause participants believe Speaker B is denying; in particular, sentence final and eventive ARCs are significantly more likely to be selected as targets for denial. However, as we found no significant interaction effect, we concluded that these effects are controlled by independent mechanisms. Our second experiment manipulated sentence position (medial versus final) and ARC type (continuative, relevance, and subjectivity; Loock, 2007) with the aim of investigating whether the narrative role of the ARC explains its information status and whether ARCs are foregrounded when they continue the narrative thread of the main clause (See Depraetere, 1996). Both experiments show that ARC content can sometimes be foregrounded or “at issue”. Thus, contextual factors influence what is foregrounded. Syntactic category alone (main clause versus ARC) does not settle the question.

References:

1. Depraetere, I. (1996). Foregrounding in relative clauses. Linguistics 34: 699-731.

2. Loock, R. (2007). Appositive relative clauses and their functions in discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 336–362.

3. Syrett, K. & Koev, T. (2015). Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of Appositives. Journal of Semantics 32: 525–577.