Abstract
This paper revisits the classic tests for movement that have been proposed in the literature on dislocated structures, arguing that discourse factors have a significant impact on the outcome of such tests. On this basis, French dislocation is shown to be a syntactically unified phenomenon involving both Left- and Right-Dislocation, irrespective of whether it is resumed by a clitic or a non-clitic element. The epitome of interface phenomena, French dislocation is argued to be the output of the interaction between syntax and the discourse component, requiring only a very limited contribution of narrow syntax: all that is required is that the dislocated element be merged by adjunction to a Discourse Projection (defined as a maximal projection with root properties). No agreement or checking of a designated (e.g. topic) feature is necessary, hence no syntactic movement of any sort need be postulated. The so-called resumptive element is argued to be a full-fledged pronoun rather than a true syntactic resumptive. The relation between the dislocated element and its resumptive is captured in terms of discourse coreference. The core syntactic and interpretive properties of left- and right-dislocation are shown to be identical; differences between the two configurations are shown to derive straightforwardly from the properties of the two sides of the clause periphery.
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This research was partly funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant #041R00433), which is gratefully acknowledged. I wish to thank the following people for comments and/or discussion: David Adger, Cedric Boeckx, João Costa, Peter Culicover, Jenny Doetjes, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Liliane Haegeman, Kyle Johnson, Ruth Kempson, Luis López, Fritz Newmeyer, Eric Mathieu, Bernadette Plunkett, Paul Postal, Ben Shaer, Nicolas Sobin, George Tsoulas, as well as the anonymous reviewers — none of whom should be assumed to agree with everything in this paper. Thanks also to the audience at the ZAS workshop on dislocated elements (Berlin, November 2003) and the York Staff & Student Seminar 2003.
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De Cat, C. French dislocation without movement. Nat Language Linguistic Theory 25, 485–534 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-007-9023-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-007-9023-z