Right-dislocation

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Cathbad
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Right-dislocation

Post by Cathbad »

Do any of you guys have any good accessible resources on right-dislocation in natlangs? Describing Morphosyntax is curiously mysterious on the subject.

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Radagast
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Post by Radagast »

As far as I know right dislocation in most languages is associated with focus and/or afterthought pragmatic status.
[i]D'abord on ne parla qu'en poésie ; on ne s'avisa de raisonner que long-temps après.[/i] J. J. Rousseau, Sur l'origine des langues. 1783

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Post by Cathbad »

Okay, so how would you analyze something like this:

PRONOUN.CASE [COMPLEX NOUN PHRASE]

If this is a required construction for complex noun phrases (ie. noun phrases with certain types of modifiers) to appear in non-subject syntactic roles? Since the language is SVO, all such arguments are post-verbal and usually clause-final (anything less complex occurs nearer the verb). Can this be termed right-dislocation?

It obviously has implications for focus as well, since you're not very likely to use descriptive modifiers on a topical noun.

EDIT: the CASE of the pronoun is of course the appropriate CASE for the syntactic role of the COMPLEX NOUN PHRASE.

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Post by Radagast »

Its only dislocation if the place in which the NP is found in a place where it does not normally appear. That means that if your language obliugatorily have all NPs that aren't direct arguments of the verb last - then that is not dislocation.

As far as I know dislocation is generally characterized by NP's being outside of the actual clause, that means that the main clause doesn't assign case to dislocated NP's. Also right dislocation is often characterised by a a pause between the main clause and the dislocated NP.

Don't take my word for it though - I haven't read up on this.
[i]D'abord on ne parla qu'en poésie ; on ne s'avisa de raisonner que long-temps après.[/i] J. J. Rousseau, Sur l'origine des langues. 1783

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Post by Cathbad »

Okay, thanks. No, what you're saying makes sense, from what little I know on the topic of dislocation in general. The problem remains on how to adequately describe this construction though :)

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