(Non)Restrictive Nominal Modification

Abstract

The chapter is concerned with the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive modification of nouns, focusing on relative clause (RC) modification but with a view also to adjectival/participial (AP) modification. After a brief introduction to the traditional notion of (non)restrictiveness, it presents a preliminary semantic characterization of (non)restrictiveness in relation to RCs and some observational characteristics of restrictive and nonrestrictive RCs, respectively. The central part of the chapter discusses the formal (syntactic–)semantic explication of restrictive vs nonrestrictive RC modification, in particular the question of whether or how nonrestrictive modification can be accounted for in compositional terms. Three different formal semantic approaches to this issue are presented: standard syntax with bidimensional semantics, nonstandard syntax with unidimensional semantics, and dynamic accounts. The presentation also looks into the epistemic status and discourse‐relational contribution of nonrestrictive RCs, as compared to independent sentences. As for (non)restrictive AP modification, it is shown that a semantically restrictive AP modifier may be nonrestrictive (nonrestricting) in context. More generally, it is argued that the term “appositive,” which is sometimes used as a synonym for “nonrestrictive,” might be reserved for modifiers that by prosody or punctuation are explicitly marked as being nonrestrictive (nonrestricting).