Dislocated elements in discourse: Syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives (review)

Being the twelfth of the Routledge Studies in Germanic Linguistics, this volume represents the selected works of the 2003 conference on Dislocated Elements in Discourse held in Berlin. Dislocation is loosely defined as "the removal of phrases from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right edge" (p. 1). Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena and takes different forms across languages. It has been found closely related to nominal and adverbial expressions, and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus. The aim of the collection is to answer three sets of questions regarding dislocation, namely: How can the syntactic properties of dislocation structures be captured within a general model of syntactic structure? How is dislocation related to a sentence's information structure and illocutionary force? And in what sense are the initial elements in certain dislocation structures "extrasentential" and how can this be captured theoretically (p. 2)? The 16 chapters are accordingly organized into three sections, tackling the intriguing phenomenon of dislocation concerning its syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse properties.

The section on structures of dislocation unfolds with Javier Pérez-Guerra and David Tizón-Couto's overview, "On left dislocation in the recent history of English: Theory and data hand in hand". They diachronically examine the features of left dislocation as a syntactic strategy that alters the unmarked organization of the clause (such as given-before-new, end weight) in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. The major findings are as follows. First, left dislocation declines over time. Second, it is mostly productive in written and in formal texts. Third, it is informationally heterogeneous. Finally, due to its length, left dislocation is highly marked as regards (lack of) compliance with the End-weight principle (i.e., lengthy elements usually appear at the very end of a clause).

Günther Grewendorf explores "The left clausal periphery: Clitic left dislocation in Italian and left dislocation in German". Applying Rizzi's (1997) Split-CP model of left clausal periphery, Grewendorf argues for a movement analysis of two left-dislocated structures in two different languages. The essence is that the left-dislocated element and the resumptive pronoun are generated as a single constituent. The comparative study shows that the Italian dislocation structure obeys islands but does not license parasitic gaps whereas the German one displays the opposite pattern. This difference results from different kinds of empty categories in the two languages.

The split-CP approach, however, is challenged by both Nicholas Sobin in "Echo questions and split CP" and Frederick J. Newmeyer in "On split CPs and the 'perfectness' of language". Sobin observes that English echo questions are more consistent with the classic unitary CP approach to the left periphery. Similarly, Newmeyer proposes that dislocated elements in split CPs may be adjunctions rather than Topic and Focus. Both hence argue against the necessity for a split-CP analysis.

In "Periphery effects and the dynamics of tree growth", Ruth Kempson, Jieun Kiaer, and Ronnie Cann introduce the parsing-oriented framework of Dynamic Syntax to the analysis of left- and right-dislocation. The central tenet of the approach is that underspecification and processes of update are intrinsic to the structural explanation of language. On this view, the interpretation of dislocation is built up during a parse sequence, proceeding from left to right and constructing a tree that represents the given structure's Logical Form.

The second section centers on the content of dislocation, that is, the kind of semantic, pragmatic, and discourse information that dislocation structures are taken to encode. In "Sentential particles and clausal typing in Venetan dialects", Nicola Munaro and Cecilia Poletto describe the syntactic and semantic behaviour of certain Venetan sentential particles which can appear only in matrix clauses and display the typical properties of X0-elements. They argue that these particles are generated in a very high position in the C-domain, to fill...