THE SYNTAX OF LEFT DISLOCATION IN ENGLISH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY WITH ROMANCE LANGUAGES

Abstract

This paper examines the syntax and discourse-pragmatic properties of left dislocation in English as opposed to Romance languages. The study also resolves a long-standing puzzle: English has strong discourse use for left dislocation, but does not have the separate clitic system determining clitic left-dislocation in Romance. Building on cartographic analyses of the left periphery, information-structural theory, and formal treatments of resumption, we combine insights on these constructions derived from descriptive grammars and earlier empirical work. For the English pattern, I concentrate on hanging-topic and afterthought constructions with optional resumption (with strong prosodic demarcation); for Romance, this involves clitic resumption, island insensitivity and categorical topic diagnostics. It is argued in the paper that both kinds of languages come to coalesce onto a uniform syntactic matrix at CP but do so by different means at PF and in the morph syntactic domain of presumptive phenomena. The results reconcile English topic tracking with a clitic-less language; explain why Romance has systematic resumption and where the structures are different in their (e.g. island-sensitive) constraints and entailments (weak crossover). The cross-linguistic viewpoint sharpens theoretical generalizations about the articulated left periphery and contributes to a modular explanation of dislocation phenomena whose distribution is assumed to be contingent with language-specific settings of syntax, prosody, and information structure.