Dislocation (syntax)
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In syntax, dislocation is the detachment of a constituent from its phrase. In some languages, including English, a pronoun then takes its place in the phrase. For example, the sentence "We went to the store, she and I" has the same meaning as "She and I went to the store", but "she and I" has been dislocated and moved to the end of the sentence, with the pronoun "we" taking its original place.
A dislocation can be classified as a right dislocation, in which the original constituent is postponed (as in the above example), or a left dislocation, in which it is advanced. Right dislocation often occurs with a clarifying afterthought: "We went to the store" is a coherent sentence, but "she and I" is added afterward to clarify exactly who "we" is. By contrast, left dislocation is like clefting: it can be used to emphasize or define a topic. For example, the sentence "the little girl, the dog bit her" has the same meaning as "the dog bit the little girl," but it emphasizes that the little girl (and not the dog) is the topic of interest; one might expect the next sentence to be "she needs to see a doctor", rather than "it needs to be leashed".
Another way to classify a dislocation is as a pronominal dislocation, in which the constituent is replaced by a pronoun in the original phrase (as in the above examples), or as a clitic dislocation, in which it's replaced by a clitic. However, in a pro-drop language, it is not always necessary for the constituent to be replaced with anything.
[edit] Dislocation in French
Informal spoken French uses right dislocation very naturally and extensively, to detach semantic information from the grammatical information. Whereas a French news article would likely translate "the dog bit the little girl" as "Le chien a mordu la petite fille" (literally "the dog has bitten the little girl"), in everyday speech one might hear "Il l'a mordue, le chien, la petite fille" (literally "it her has bitten, the dog, the little girl"), in which both le chien ("the dog") and la petite fille ("the little girl") have been dislocated to the right and replaced by pronouns. This phenomenon was first studied in French by linguist Joseph Vendryes.
It has been proposed that informal spoken French can be analyzed as having polypersonal agreement; that is, the various (mostly clitic) pronouns surrounding the verb can be viewed as inflections on the verb that agree in person, number, and sometimes gender with its various arguments.
Author Raymond Queneau, whose favourite example of dislocation in French was Il l'a-t-il jamais attrapé, le gendarme, son voleur ? ("Has he ever caught him, the policeman, his thief?"), has been inspired to write many articles such as Connaissez-vous le Chinook ? ("Do you know Chinookan?"). According to Queneau, right dislocation in Chinookan is commonplace.
[edit] Dislocation in Cantonese
Colloquial Cantonese often uses right dislocation when afterthoughts occur after completing a sentence. Because it is a pro-drop language, no pronoun is used when a subject is dislocated, leading to an appearance of changed word order. For instance, the normal word order is subject verb object (SVO):
Dislocation can result in the appearance of verb object subject (VOS) word order because no pronoun is used:
At a deep level though, the sentence is still SVO but only appears to be VOS due to dislocation and pronoun dropping. Right dislocation in Cantonese can occur with auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and sometimes subordinate clauses in addition to subjects.
[edit] References
- Lambrecht, Knud. 2001. Dislocation. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible, eds., Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook. (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 20). Vol. 2, 1050-1078. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.
