‘Redefining at-issueness as a gradable concept: The effect of clause type and clause position on at-issue potential’ (Lecture)

‘Redefining at-issueness as a gradable concept: The effect of clause type and clause position on at-issue potential’

Sentences that consist of multiple clauses are generally expected to contain one (matrix) clause that carries the main point of the utterance, the at-issue content, and other (subordinate) clauses whose content is more peripheral and therefore not-at-issue. The traditional semantic view on at-issueness has held that the at-issue status of clauses is immutable and that, for example, Appositive Relative Clauses (ARCs) always contribute not-at-issue material. Discursive accounts and more recent experimental research, however, show that the at-issue status of ARCs can change depending on their position in a sentence. I will report the results of six self-paced reading experiments in which reading times are measured when an ambiguous pronoun It is disambiguated to a referent in a subordinate clause or a matrix clause in varying positions. Results show that not only ARCs but also temporal adverbial clauses can achieve at-issue status in sentence-final position, to the extent that they appear more at-issue than the matrix clause they follow. These findings suggest that the (not-)at-issue status of clauses is not an immutable property inherent to these clauses, but rather a dynamic property that can vary depending on both clause type and clause position. This view allows for a more comprehensive analysis of at-issue status which can better integrate ARCs and potentially other subordinate clauses into theories of at-issueness.