Colaço, MadalenaMatos, Gabriela2018-04-112018-04-112016Colaço, Madalena & Gabriela Matos (2016) Explicative clauses in portuguese as a case of parentheses. Romance languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected papers from Going Romance 28. Organizado por Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo & Sandra Pereira, 43-60. Amesterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins978-90-272-0390-8978-90-272-6641-5http://hdl.handle.net/10451/32698A subset of causal explicative clauses in European Portuguese (EP) introduced by the connectors pois ‘for’, que ‘that’ and porque ‘because’ has been classified either as coordinate or subordinate clauses, or alternatively as autonomous discursive expressions. Extending previous work, we claim that, although the sentences they head present most of the characteristics of subordination, they establish with the host sentence a paratactic link, and involve secondary and non-restrictive information. We will argue that these explicative clauses arise from parenthetical inclusion via Par-Merge, in the sense of de Vries (2012). This analysis allows us to provide a syntactic account for these clauses, and to capture some of their correlated discursive properties.engCausal explicative clausesParenthetical clausesParataxisSubordinationParenthetical mergebook part