Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2015) 33:191–229 DOI 10.1007/s11049-014-9256-6 Parenthetical verb constructions, fragment answers, and constituent modification James Griffiths Received: 1 October 2012 / Accepted: 16 July 2013 / Published online: 12 August 2014 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract I argue that parenthetical verb clauses (PVCs) (Urmson in Mind 1952) such as John reckons, I confess, and she hopes always modify (that is, ‘have an inter- pretative effect upon’) propositions that may express illocutionary force. I illustrate that the apparent ability of PVCs to modify subclausal constituents is illusory, and that insights into how PVCs interact with the proposition that they modify are gained from exploring the syntactic mechanisms that maintain this illusion—the most impor- tant of which is the insight that constructions in which a PVC is observed modifying a subclausal constituent are best understood as fragment amalgams. Keywords Amalgamation · Fragment answers · Parenthetical verbs · PF-deletion 1 Introduction The italicised clauses in (1) may be interpreted as mitigating the speaker’s commit- ment to the truth of the proposition denoted by the clause that follows it (see Simons 2007 and references therein). (1) a. {I think / I’m told} Pete and Lucy are coming to the party. b. {Pete i reckons / Pete i says} he i and Lucy are coming to the party. 1 1 The following sub/superscripting conventions are adopted: subscripted numbers denote syntactic move- ment, and subscripted letters denote coreference. When a moved XP also corefers with another element, superscripted letters are employed. For example, in (i) XP has moved and corefers with YP, which has not moved. (i) [YP i [XP i 1 ...t 1 ]]. J. Griffiths (B ) CLCG, Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: j.e.griffiths@rug.nl