Open Access'These hands, they are apt enough to dislocate and tear thy flesh': on left dislocation in the recent history of the English language
Author(s) -
Javier Pérez Guerra,
David Tizón-Couto
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.35.2004.237
Subject(s) - dislocation , focus (optics) , orality , linguistics , phenomenon , association (psychology) , history , psychology , philosophy , physics , optics , pedagogy , epistemology , psychotherapist , literacy , condensed matter physics
As part of a major project on the syntactic organisation of written discourse in the recent history of the English language, this paper tackles the distribution of sentences comprising left-dislocated constituents in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. Once the phenomenon of left dislocation has been properly defined, this investigation will concentrate on the analysis of the corpus in the following directions: (i) statistical evolution of left dislocation in the recent history of the English language; (ii) the influence of orality and genre on left dislocation; (iii) information conveyed by the left-dislocated material, that is, the discourse-based referentiality potential of the left-dislocated constituents in terms of recoverability, and its association with end-focus; and (iv) grammatical complexity of the left-dislocated material and its association with end-weight.