Cover not available

In:Outside the Clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituents
Edited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer and Arne Lohmann
[Studies in Language Companion Series 178] 2016
► pp. 203–240

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Left-dislocated strings in Modern English epistolary prose

A comparison with contemporary spoken Left Dislocation

ORCiD logo with link | Universidade de Vigo
Published online: 3 October 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.178.08tiz
This paper investigates the formal and functional features of strings that include both a left-dislocated constituent and a coreferring resumptive in the subsequent clause in Modern English letters and diaries. Such left-dislocated strings embody, to differing degrees, the reportedly speech-like and informal contemporary Left Dislocation construction. The data was analyzed according to a range of factors relating to the inner configuration of such strings (complexity, information status, animacy, resumption, continuity, etc.) and examined by means of a range of statistical tests such as linear regression. The results provide a clear and broad picture of (a) their overall usage profile in comparison with contemporary spoken Left Dislocation, (b) the processing constraints at work within them, and (c) their unlikely status as prospective markers of orality in Modern English epistolary prose.
References (80)
References
Anagnostopoulou, Elena, van Riemsdijk, Henk & Zwarts, Frans. 1997. Materials on Left Dislocation [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 14]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Andrews, Avery D. 2007. Relative clauses. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 2: Complex Constructions, 2nd edn, Timothy Shopen (ed.), 206-236. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Arnold, Jennifer E., Wasow, Thomas, Losongco, Anthony & Ginstrom, Ryan. 2000. Heaviness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language 76(1): 28-55. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing Linguistic Data. A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Birner, Betty & Ward, Gregory. 2002. Information packaging. In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey Pullum (eds), 1363-1447. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crystal, David. 2003. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Kytö, Merja. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues. Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2005. Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses. Linguistics 43(3): 449-470. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dons, Ute. 2004. Descriptive Adequacy of Early Modern English Grammars [TiEL 47]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. 1992. Syntax. In The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 2: 1066–476, Norman Blake (ed.), 207-408. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fonteyn, Lauren & van de Pol, Nikki. 2015. Divide and conquer: The formation and functional dynamics of the Modern English ing-clause network. English Language and Linguistics. Oct 2015: 1-35. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ford, Cecilia, Fox, Barbara & Thompson, Sandra A. 2003. Social interaction and grammar. In The New Psychology of Language. Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, Vol. 2, Michael Tomasello (ed.), 119-143. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Geluykens, Ronald. 1992. From Discourse Process to Grammatical Construction: On Left Dislocation in English [Studies in Discourse Grammar 1]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1993. Syntactic, semantic and interactional prototypes: The case of left-dislocation. In Conceptualizations and Mental Processing in Language, Richard Geiger & Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (eds.), 709-730. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Geurts, Bart. 1999. Presuppositions and Pronouns. Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68(1): 1-76. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1979. On Understanding Grammar. New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1983. Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Cross-language Study [Typological Studies in Language 3]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gregory, Michelle & Michaelis, Laura. 2001. Topicalization and left-dislocation: A functional opposition revisited. Journal of Pragmatics 33(11): 1665-1706. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gómez-González, María Ángeles. 2001. The Theme-topic Interface: Evidence from English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 71]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred 1999. English in Nineteenth-century England. An introduction. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2001. Eighteenth-century English. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Götze, Michael, Weskott, Thomas, Endriss, Cornelia, Fiedler, Ines, Hinterwimmer, Stefan, Petrova, Svetlana, Schwarz, Anne, Skopeteas, Stavros & Stoel, Ruben. 2007. Information structure. In Information Structure in Cross-linguistic Corpora: Annotation Guidelines for Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics and Information Structure [Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) 7], Stefanie Dipper, Michael Götze & Stavros Skopeteas (eds), 147-188. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gundel, Janette K., Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69(2): 279-307. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1992. Syntactic weight and information status in word order variation. Linguistische Berichte 4: 196-219.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hawkins 2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2012. Patterns of asymmetry in argument structure across languages. Some principles and puzzles. In Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations [Studies in Language Companion Series 126], Pirkko Suihkonen, Bernard Comrie & Valery Solovyev (eds), 133-150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hidalgo, Raquel 2000. Establishing topic in conversation: A contrastive study of left dislocation in English and Spanish. In Talk and Text. Studies on Spoken and Written Discourse, Angela Downing Rothwell, Jesús Moya Guijarro & José I. Albentosa Hernández (eds), 137-158. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2013. Constructional Change in English: Developments in Allomorphy, Word Formation, and Syntax [Studies in English Language]. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: EUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin & Gries, Stefan T. 2009. Assessing frequency changes in multi-stage diachronic corpora: Applications for historical corpus linguistics and the study of language acquisition. Literary and Linguistic Computing 24(4): 385-401. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1933. Essentials of English grammar. New York NY: Henry Holt.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Keenan-Ochs, Elinor & Schieffelin, Bambi. 1976. Foregrounding referents: A reconsideration of left dislocation in discourse. Proceedings of the 2nd annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society , 240-257.
Kies, Daniel. 1988. Marked themes with and without pronominal reinforcement: their meaning and distribution in discourse. In Pragmatics, Discourse and Text: Some Systemically-inspired Approaches, Erich Steiner & Robert Velman (eds), 47-72. London: Pinter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd. 1991. Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English: Problems of Control and Interpretation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. Adverbial participial clauses in English. In Converbs in cross-linguistic perspective, Martin Haspelmath & Ekkehard König (eds), 189-237. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lennard, John. 1995. Punctuation: And – ‘pragmatics’. In Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 35 Andreas Jucker (ed.), 65-98. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leonarduzzi, Laetitia & Herry, Nadine. 2005. Les dislocations: Texts et contexts. In Actes, Congrès de la Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, Toulouse: France. <[URL]> (30 March 2008).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Los, Bettelou. 2009. The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: Information structure and syntax in interaction. English Language and Linguistics 13(1): 97-125. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Los, Bettelou & Komen, Erwin. 2012. Clefts as resolution strategies after the loss of a multifunctional first position. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Traugott (eds), 884-898. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Manetta, Emily. 2007. Unexpected left dislocation: An English corpus study. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1029-1035. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 2012. The connectives and, for, but, and only as clause and discourse type indicators in 16th- and 17th-Century epistolary prose. In Meurman-Solin, Lopez-Couso & Los (eds), 164-198. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, Anneli Maria, Lopez-Couso, Jose & Los, Bettelou. 2012. Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael. 1982. The functions of left dislocation in spontaneous discourse. In The Ninth Lacus Forum, John Morreal (ed), 425-432. Columbia SC: Hornbeam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Netz, Hadar & Kuzar, Ron. 2007. Three marked theme constructions in spoken English. Journal of Pragmatics 39(2): 305-335. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Netz, Hadar, Kuzar, Ron & Eviatar, Zohar. 2011. A recipient-based study of the discourse functions of marked topic constructions. Language Sciences 33(1): 154-166. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nissim, Malvina, Dingare, Shipra, Carletta, Jean & Steedman, Mark. 2004. An annotation scheme for information status in dialogue. In Proceedings of the 4th language resources and evaluation conference (LREC 2004) , 1023–1026. Lisbon, Portugal.
Ono, Tsuyoshi & Thompson, Sandra 1994. Unattached NPs in English conversation. BLS 20: 402-419. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
PPCEME: The Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English, 1500–1710. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, 1st edn. <[URL]>
PPCMBE: The Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, 1700–1914. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, 1st edn. <[URL]>
PCEEC: The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, 1410-1695. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. University of York and University of Helsinki. Distributed through the Oxford Text Archive.
Pérez-Guerra, Javier. 1999. Historical English Syntax: A Statistical Corpus Based Study on the Organisation of Early Modern English Sentences. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Guerra, Javier & Tizón-Couto, David. 2009. On left dislocation in the recent history of English: Theory and data hand in hand. In Dislocated Elements in Discourse: Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Perspectives, Benjamin Shaer, Philippa Cook, Werner Frey & Claudia Maienborn (eds), 31-48. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Guerra, Javier. 2012. Discourse status and syntax in the history of English. Some explorations in topicalization, left-dislocation, and there-constructions. In Meurman-Solin, López-Couso & Los (eds), 121-138. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Radical Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 233-235. New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1992. The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness and information status. In Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 16], William C. Mann & Sandra A. Thompson (eds), 295-325. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1997. On the functions of left-dislocation in English discourse. In Directions in Functional Linguistics [Studies in Language Companion Series 36], Akio Kamio (ed.), 117-144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. On the limits of syntax, with reference to left-dislocation and topicalization. In The Limits of Syntax, Peter Culicover & Louise McNally (eds), 281-302. San Diego CA: Academic Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reinhart, Tanya. 1981. Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica 27(1): 53-94.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Riester, Arndt. 2008. A semantic explication of ‘information status’ and the underspecification of the recip- ients’ knowledge. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, Alte Grønn (ed.), 508-522. Oslo, Norway.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Riester, Arndt, Lorenz, David & Seemann, Nina. 2010. A recursive annotation scheme for referential information status. Proceedings of 7th language resources and evaluation conference (LREC) , 717-722. Malta. <[URL]> (30 April 2011).
Río-Rey, Carmen. 2002. Subject control and coreference in early modern English free adjuncts and absolutes. English Language and Linguistics 6(2): 309-323. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robinson, Ian. 1996. The Foundations of English Prose. The Art of Prose Writing from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 1995. On the replacement of finite complement clauses by infinitives in English. English Studies 76(4): 367-388. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English. Cognitive Linguistics 7(2): 147-182. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ross, John R. 1967. Constraints on Variables in Syntax. PhD dissertation, MIT. (Published as Infinite syntax! 1986. Norton NJ: Ablex).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Snider, Neal. 2005. A corpus study of left dislocation and topicalization. Stanford University: Linguistics Department. <[URL]> (30 April 2008).
Snider, Neal & Zaenen, Annie. 2006. Animacy and syntactic structure: Fronted NPs in English. In Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on Themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, Ronald M. Kaplan, Miriam Butt, Mary Dalrymple & Tracy Holloway King (eds), 323-338. Stanford CA: CSLI. <[URL]> (30 April 2008).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tizón-Couto, David. 2012. Left Dislocation in English. A Functional-Discoursal Approach [Linguistic Insights 143]. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016, In press. Complexity and genre distribution of leftdislocated strings after the fixation of SVO syntax. In Explorations in English Historical Syntax, Hubert Cuyckens, Hendrik De Smet, Liesbet Heyvaert & Charlotte Maekelberghe (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2007. Old English left-dislocations: Their structure and information status. Folia Linguistica 41(3-4): 405-441. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Hoorick, Bart 1994. Pragmatic positions and the history of English word order. Working Papers in Functional Grammar 56. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van linden, An & Davidse, Kristin. 2012. The role of the accessibility of the subject in the development of adjectival complementation from Old English to Present-Day English. In Meurman-Solin, Lopez-Couso & Los (eds), 199-227. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1997. Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change 9(1): 81-105. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yaruss, J. Scott. 1999. Utterance length, syntactic complexity, and childhood stuttering. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42(2): 329-344. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Pashkova, Tatiana, Hannah Lee, Mark Murphy & Shanley E. M. Allen
2025. Left dislocations across discourse types in monolinguals and bilinguals’ English. Linguistics DOI logo
Tizón-Couto, David
2017. Exploring the Left Dislocation construction by means of multiple linear regression. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 31 ► pp. 301 ff. DOI logo
Tizón-Couto, David
2018. Complexity and genre distribution of left-dislocated strings after the fixation of SVO syntax. In Explorations in English historical syntax [Studies in Language Companion Series, 198], ► pp. 203 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue