Utterance phenomena in syntax

Abstract

This dissertation explores utterance-oriented phenomena in syntax, focusing on the integration of discourse-related elements into sentence structure. Utterance-oriented phenomena are sentence-peripheral, conversational linguistic expressions that convey expressive meaning in terms of speaker attitude. By analyzing data from Turkish and Japanese, the dissertation presents a formal syntactic framework that accommodates these phenomena within an expanded syntactic hierarchy, particularly through the functional projection of the Utterance Phrase (UttP). The empirical data representing utterance-oriented phenomena come from three different constructions in this work: utterance oriented markers, gapped right dislocation and gapless right dislocation. Utterance-oriented markers, a class of discourse particles that satisfy the criteria for being utterance-oriented phenomena, are argued to base-adjoined to UttP either at the head level or the phrasal level. Gapped right dislocation in Turkish and Japanese is taken to involve a rightward syntactic movement to UttP, where they adjoin to the phrasal level. Gapless right dislocation, which come in different forms, are associated with different syntactic structures depending on their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. The dissertation overall contributes to the broader understanding of how syntactic structure interfaces with discourse, offering a nuanced view of how conversational phenomena are syntactically represented across these two languages, with a potential cross-linguistic implications.