Embedded appositives

In earlier work, I claim that certain kinds of appositives are always interpreted at text level. This claim has since been challenged persuasively. The questions I would like to answer now are,

• What circumstances allow, facilitate, or require non-text-level readings?
• And why did I ever think that text-level interpretations were the only ones possible?

This data set, drawn from about 177 million words of novels, newspaper articles, and television interviews, is organized and annotated to help answer these questions. It consists of 278 appositive relative clauses that are syntactically embedded below verbs of propositional attitude and verbs of saying. Each example is annotated for

1. the root form of the embedding predicate;
2. the level of interpretation; and
3. the textual evidencefor that interpretation, where available.

Javascript interface, full data set in XML, and notes on the motivation, data, and annotations

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Last update: 2008-11-30