Final Report Summary - INCPAR (Incomplete Parenthesis: Determining how and why secondary propositions can be elliptical or fragmented from a cross-linguistic and multifaceted theoretical perspective) The linguistics project INCPAR studies parenthetical expressions and related construction types. These are used to provide side-information to the main sentence, or meta-communicative information. We intend to explain the properties of parentheses, trying to disentangle the effects of different modules of the language system as a whole (syntax, prosody, discourse).We investigate the range of syntactically and semantically different types of parentheses from a universal as well as a cross-linguistic perspective (with some emphasis on English, Dutch and Turkish). We distinguish variation in the internal make-up of parentheses from variation in the way parentheses can be connected to the main sentence, providing clearly defined variables and diagnostics. Parentheses are often incomplete in the sense that they would not suffice as stand-alone utterances. Not only may they visibly involve reduction, we also show that various forms of concealed ellipsis are at stake.
