Appositive sentences and the structure(s) of coordination

Coordination is not a unitary phenomenon: as far as binding and scope of externalelements are concerned, appositive coordinate sentences may differ from their nonappositiveintegrated counterparts in the same way as appositive relatives differfrom restrictive relatives, suggesting that different configurations are involved inappositive vs. non-appositive sentences. The Set-Merge (Kayne 1994) and PairMerge (Munn 1992) proposals for dealing with coordination, although relevant, arenot enough to distinguish appositive from non-appositive sentences. The crucialdistinguishing property of appositives is their parenthetical status: they are adjunctsaffected by a feature specifying their parenthetical nature. This allows the computationalsystem, which operates bottom up and according to an Earliness Condition(Pesetsky 1989, Chomsky 2001), to interpret them as autonomous CP phases, to betransferred to the Interface components before the phases they are inserted in, thuspreventing c-command effects from external elements at SEM.