Abstract
This paper aims to explore how discourse functions and prosodic realisations can be related through an analysis of appositive relative clauses (ARCs) in English. Based on a corpus study of spoken British English through the use of the Aix-Marsec and ICE-GB corpora, our aim is twofold: 1) to establish the singularity of ARCs within the global category of parentheticals; and 2) to show that, for one specific syntactic structure, in this instance ARCs, differences in discourse functions correspond not only to differences in morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics as proposed in Loock's (La Proposition relative appositive en anglais contemporain à l'écrit et à l'oral: fonctions discursives et structures concurrentes, 2005, Journal of Pragmatics 39: 336–362, 2007, Appositive relative clauses in English: discourse functions and competing structures, John Benjamins, 2010) threefold discourse typology, but also to differences in prosodic features (regarding tonal, temporal and intensity aspects).
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