As-parenthetical constructions in English: A constraint-based approach.

The English as-parenthetical construction (APC) displays a significant resemblance to the nonrestrictive relative clause (NRC), but at the same time has its own unique internal and external distributional properties. This paper investigates the uses of the construction through corpus data and shows that the interaction between the lexicon (in particular, the lexical properties of as) and constructional constraints are responsible for the APCs distinctive grammatical properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]