Dislocation (syntax)

Dislocation is the syntactic operation in which a constituent is detached from a phrase and often taken up by a pronoun. Left and right dislocation are distinguished, depending on whether the operation is regressive or progressive. Pronominal and clitic dislocation can also be distinguished. In pro-drop languages, a pronoun or clitic is often not used.

Left dislocation, like clefting, is used in many languages to emphasize (or define) the topic. In The little girl, the dog bit her, the little girl was dislocated to the left and taken up by her.

French

Some other languages, such as vernacular (informally spoken) French, use right dislocation very naturally and extensively, to detach semantic information from the grammatical information. The above sentence could be spontaneously translated in French as Il l'a mordue, le chien, la petite fille. ("He bit her, the dog, the little girl.") In this example, both le chien and la petite fille were dislocated to the right and taken up by il and l'.

This phenomenon, first studied in French by linguist Joseph Vendryes, has inspired author Raymond Queneau, whose favourite example was Il l'a-t-i jamais attrapé, le gendarme, son voleur ? ("Has he ever caught him, the policeman, his thief?"), to write many articles such as Connaissez-vous le Chinook ? ("Do you know Chinook language?"). According to Queneau, right dislocation in Chinook is commonplace.

Cantonese

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Colloquial Cantonese often uses right dislocation when afterthoughts occur after completing a sentence. Because it is a pro-drop language, no pronoun is used when a subject is dislocated, leading to an appearance of changed word order. For instance, the normal word order is subject verb object (SVO):

王生(Mr. Wong) 返(return) 咗(ASPECT) 屋企(home) 。(.)
Mr. Wong returned home.

Dislocation can result in the appearance of verb object subject (VOS) word order because no pronoun is used:

返(return) 咗(ASPECT) 屋企(home) ，(,) 王生(Mr. Wong) 。(.)
[He] returned home, Mr. Wong.

At a deep level though, the sentence is still SVO but only appears to be VOS due to dislocation and pronoun dropping. Right dislocation in Cantonese can occur with auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and sometimes subordinate clauses in addition to subjects.

See also: Dislocation (syntax), Adverb, Auxiliary verb, Cantonese (linguistics), Chinook, Clefting, Clitic, Deep structure