(Some) Parentheses are focus-sensitive operators

Abstract

The term parenthetical encompasses a range of constructions, including appositives, speaker-oriented adverbials, and speech report tags. Despite lending their name to the category, parenthesized parentheticals have been little discussed. We explore a parenthesized construction with two interesting properties: (1) it is less independent than previously studied parentheticals and (2) it gives rise to an implication absent from its non-parenthesized paraphrase: Sally drinks (herbal) tea implies Sally does not drink black tea. We show that this construction, which we call the Restrictive Parenthesized Parenthetical construction, differs from appositives and orthographic representations of focus. Instead, we propose an analysis that treats it as a focus-sensitive operator: its extra implication results from invoking and negating a set of alternatives to the content within the parentheses.