conj:expl: explicative conjunct
This subtype of the co-ordination relation (by itself not a dependency relation) is used for explicative conjuncts, that is, phrases that more in-depth explain, reformulate or expand upon another phrase in the preceding clause (or the whole clause itself).
Even if, traditionally, explicative conjuncts are sometimes described as “appositions”, they represent a more general construction than UD’s appos, which is limited to (almost) immediately adjoined noun phrases; while both are in a sense co-referential, explicative conjuncts differ from appositions mainly under the aspect that explicative conjuncts show to be at the same foregrounding level than the phrases they are related to (whereas appos rather implies background information). This makes them a subclass of co-ordination.
Any phrase can be the explicative conjunct of any other phrase, but it will show an alignment in its syntactic encoding towards the latter, e.g. a clausal explicative conjunct of a noun phrase will be usually introduced by a complementiser. The explicative conjunct, as any regular conjunct (or apposition), will recover the case of the expanded phrase, as far as this is applicable. The explicative conjunct may be elliptical.
Often, but not always, an explicative conjunct is introduced by a conjunctional element, which is currently labeled as CCONJ, even if this is now under scrutiny (an ADV/PART tag might be favoured, also to avoid a form of contextual annotation). In Late and Medieval Latin, the grammaticalised verbal phrases scilicet ‘you may know’ and id est ‘that is’ (sometimes univerbated) are amongst the most common explicative connecting elements. The relation might also be pointed to by dedicated punctuation marks.
Explicative conjuncts do look similar to dislocated elements. Possible differences are:
- dislocations are lexically asymmetric: most of the times the dislocated element is a heavy and lexically full unit, while the dislocating element tends to be a functional word like a pronoun or a determiner;
- logically, explicative conjuncts always come after the expanded element, while dislocated elements do not have this constraint: they are pushed at the margins of the sentence, be it before or after the dislocating element.
‘And so dux Adalbertus sent his legate, that is Agelmannus, who went…’ (LLCT)
‘Therefore, this name “man” said of Christ and of other men always signifies the same form; namely, human nature.’ (Summa contra Gentiles, ITTB)
‘Nor are we without justification if we adorn this illustrious vernacular with our second epithet, by calling it “cardinal”.’ (De Vulgari Eloquentia, UDante)
‘But there is nothing the monarch could covet, for his jurisdiction is bounded only by the ocean; whereas this is not the case with other rulers, whose sovereignty extends only as far as the neighbouring kingdom, as is the case, for instance, with the kings of Castille and of Aragon. ‘ (De Monarchia, UDante)
conj:expl in other languages: [la]