A Study of the leftdislocation Construction in English.docVIP

A Study of the left-dislocation Construction in English Abstract: This paper analyzes the English left-dislocation construction in terms of its syntactic/semantic structure, information structure as well as topical structure. According to the analysis, the left-dislocation construction consists of two components: the left detached section and the matrix clause. The left detached section is mostly a nominal phrase and it is linked with the matrix clause via coreference by means of usually a pro-form. The information contained in the left detached section can neither be too new nor too old. It is mainly the anchored brand-new information, the unused new information or the inferable information which differs greatly from the typical information structure of the canonical sentence. The left detached section acts as an independent discourse unit brings to it such textual functions as topic which dominates the matrix clause in the right. Key words: left-dislocation construction, syntactic/semantic structure, information s structure, topical structure Introduction The first one to analyze the left dislocation as a language structure is Ross（1967）. As the example (1) shows, according to the viewpoints of creating linguistics, left dislocations is a sentence pattern through transformation. That is to say, a component part of a canonical clause was moved left from its original place to the beginning of the whole new non-canonical clause which consists of a left-dislocated element and a propositional clause or a matrix clause. Your friend John, I saw him last night. Concerning with its function, many scholars thought it’s related to the topic. Lehman (1998) thought, “匱he lbeginning of a sentence usually serves as the topic position of the whole sentence, especially the noun phrase of left dislocation.” This opinion holds that the left dislocated element is either to introduce a new topic (Gundel1985) or just to be used to mark topics (Reinhart1981). The paper is b