Dislocation (syntax)

Last updated

In syntax, dislocation is a sentence structure in which a constituent, which could otherwise be either an argument or an adjunct of the clause, occurs outside the clause boundaries either to its left or to its right. In this English example They went to the store, Mary and Peter the dislocation occurs to the right.

Contents

The dislocated element is often separated by a pause (comma in writing) from the rest of the sentence. Its place within the clause is often occupied by a pronoun (e.g. they).

There are two types of dislocation: right dislocation, in which the constituent is postponed (as in the above example), or a left dislocation, in which it is advanced. Right dislocation often occurs with a clarifying afterthought: They went to the store is a coherent sentence, but Mary and Peter is added afterward to clarify exactly who they are. By contrast, left dislocation is like clefting: it can be used to emphasize or define a topic. For example, the sentence This little girl, the dog bit her has the same meaning as The dog bit this little girl but it emphasizes that the little girl (and not the dog) is the topic of interest. One might expect the next sentence to be The little girl needs to see a doctor, rather than The dog needs to be leashed. This type of dislocation is a feature of topic-prominent languages.

In French

Informal spoken French uses right dislocation very naturally and extensively, to detach semantic information from the grammatical information. Whereas a French news article would likely translate The dog bit the little girl as Le chien a mordu la petite fille (lit. "The dog has bitten the little girl"), in everyday speech one might hear Il l'a mordue, le chien, la petite fille (lit. "It has bitten her, the dog, the little girl"), in which both le chien ("the dog") and la petite fille ("the little girl") have been dislocated to the right and replaced by pronouns within the clause. This phenomenon was first studied in French by linguist Joseph Vendryes.

It has been proposed that informal spoken French can be analyzed as having polypersonal agreement; that is, the various (mostly clitic) pronouns surrounding the verb can be viewed as inflections on the verb that agree in person, number, and sometimes gender with its various arguments.

Author Raymond Queneau, whose favourite example of dislocation in French was L'a-t-il jamais attrapé, le gendarme, son voleur ? ("Has he ever caught him, the policeman, his thief?"), has been inspired to write many articles such as Connaissez-vous le Chinook ? ("Do you know Chinookan?"). According to Queneau, right dislocation in Chinookan is commonplace.

In Cantonese

Colloquial Cantonese often uses right dislocation when afterthoughts occur after completing a sentence. [1] 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

wong4 saang1

Mr. Wong

faan1

return

zo2

PFV

屋企。

uk1 kei2

home

王生 返 咗 屋企。

{wong4 saang1} faan1 zo2 {uk1 kei2}

{Mr. Wong} return PFV home

Mr. Wong returned home.

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

faan1

return

zo2

PFV

屋企

uk1 kei2

home

喇,

laa3,

SFP,

王生。

wong4 saang1

Mr. Wong

返 咗 屋企 喇, 王生。

faan1 zo2 {uk1 kei2} laa3, {wong4 saang1}

return PFV home SFP, {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. Often a sentence-final particle (SFP) is required after the main clause, otherwise the sentence would sound strange or unacceptable. Right dislocation in Cantonese can occur with auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and sometimes subordinate clauses in addition to subjects. [1]

Being a Chinese language, Cantonese is also a topic-prominent language and thus features left dislocation. [1] For instance:

王生

wong4 saang1

Mr. Wong

已經

ji5 ging1

already

maai5

buy

zo2

PFV

奶。

naai5

milk

王生 已經 買 咗 奶。

{wong4 saang1} {ji5 ging1} maai5 zo2 naai5

{Mr. Wong} already buy PFV milk

Mr. Wong already bought the milk.

Topicalization can make this sentence appear to be object–subject–verb (OSV):

naai5

milk

王生

wong4 saang1

Mr. Wong

已經

ji5 ging1

already

maai5

buy

咗。

zo2

PFV

奶 王生 已經 買 咗。

naai5 {wong4 saang1} {ji5 ging1} maai5 zo2

milk {Mr. Wong} already buy PFV

[As for] the milk, Mr. Wong already bought [it].

Both left and right dislocation can even be featured in the same sentence:

naai5

milk

已經

ji5 ging1

already

maai5

buy

zo2

PFV

喇,

laa3,

SFP,

王生。

wong4 saang1

Mr. Wong

奶 已經 買 咗 喇, 王生。

naai5 {ji5 ging1} maai5 zo2 laa3, {wong4 saang1}

milk already buy PFV SFP, {Mr. Wong}

[As for] the milk, [he] already bought [it], Mr. Wong

Related Research Articles

A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.

English grammar Grammar of the English language

English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.

Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.

Chinese grammar Grammar of modern Standard Mandarin

The grammar of Standard Chinese or Mandarin shares many features with other varieties of Chinese. The language almost entirely lacks inflection and so words typically have only one grammatical form. Categories such as number and verb tense are frequently not expressed by any grammatical means, but there are several particles that serve to express verbal aspect and, to some extent, mood.

Cha chaan teng Type of Cantonese restaurant

Cha chaan teng, often called Hong Kong-style cafés in English, is a type of restaurant that originated in Hong Kong. Cha chaan teng are commonly found in Hong Kong, Macau, and parts of Guangdong. Due to the waves of mass migrations from Hong Kong in the 1980s, they are now established in major Chinese communities in Western countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The cafés are known for eclectic and affordable menus, which include dishes from Hong Kong cuisine and Hong Kong-style Western cuisine. They draw comparisons to Western Cafés due to their casual settings, as well as menus revolving around coffee and tea.

Papia Kristang, or just Kristang, is a creole language spoken by the Kristang, a community of people of mixed Portuguese and Malay ancestry, chiefly in Malacca, Malaysia.

In general linguistics, a reflexive pronoun, sometimes simply called a reflexive, is an anaphoric pronoun that must be coreferential with another nominal within the same clause.

Tuscarora language

Tuscarora, sometimes called Skarò˙rə̨ˀ, was the Iroquoian language of the Tuscarora people, spoken in southern Ontario, Canada, North Carolina and northwestern New York around Niagara Falls, in the United States, before its extinction in late 2020. The historic homeland of the Tuscarora was in eastern North Carolina, in and around the Goldsboro, Kinston, and Smithfield areas.

Cantonese is an analytic language in which the arrangement of words in a sentence is important to its meaning. A basic sentence is in the form of SVO, i.e. a subject is followed by a verb then by an object, though this order is often violated because Cantonese is a topic-prominent language. Unlike synthetic languages, seldom do words indicate time, gender and number by inflection. Instead, these concepts are expressed through adverbs, aspect markers, and particles, or are deduced from the context. Different particles are added to a sentence to further specify its status or intonation.

Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.

The Eastern Lombard Grammar reflects the main features of Romance languages: the word order of Eastern Lombard is usually SVO, nouns are inflected in number, adjectives agree in number and gender with the nouns, verbs are conjugated in tenses, aspects and moods and agree with the subject in number and person. The case system is present only for the weak form of the pronoun.

Wagiman language Indigenous Australian language

Wagiman, also spelt Wageman, Wakiman, Wogeman, and other variants, is a near-extinct Aboriginal Australian language spoken by a small number of Wagiman people in and around Pine Creek, in the Katherine Region of the Northern Territory.

Toy and Help Yourself are two 1997 Cantonese EPs recorded by Chinese Cantopop singer Faye Wong when she was based in Hong Kong.

Abui is a non-Austronesian language of the Alor Archipelago. It is spoken in the central part of Alor Island in Eastern Indonesia, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) province by the Abui people. The native name in the Takalelang dialect is Abui tanga which literally translates as 'mountain language'.

In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments. When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. When the subject both performs and receives the action expressed by the verb, the verb is in the middle voice. Voice is sometimes called diathesis.

The term equative is used in linguistics to refer to constructions where two entities are equated with each other. For example, the sentence Susan is our president, equates two entities "Susan" and "our president". In English, equatives are typically expressed using a copular verb such as "be", although this is not the only use of this verb. Equatives can be contrasted with predicative constructions where one entity is identified as a member of a set, such as Susan is a president. This view has been contrasted by Otto Jespersen in the first part of the XX century and by Giuseppe Longobardi and Andrea Moro in the second. In particular, Andrea Moro in 1988 proved that either DP must be non referential in the sense of Geach (1962) by exploiting arguments based on binding theory. The idea is that when a DP plays the role of predicate it enlarges its binding domain: for example, in John met his cook the pronoun can refer to the subject John but in John is his cook it cannot. The key-step was to admit that the DP following the copula can be referential whereas the one preceding must not, in other words the key-step was to admit that there can be inverse copular sentences, namely those where the subject, which is referential, follows the predicate. For a discussion starting from Moro's data see Heycock (2012). For a historical view of the development of the analysis of the copula see Moro

Pronouns in Cantonese are less numerous than their Indo-European languages counterparts. Cantonese uses pronouns that apply the same meaning to function as both subjective and objective just like many other Sinitic languages.

Yolmo language Tibeto-Burman language

Yolmo (Hyolmo) or Helambu Sherpa, is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Hyolmo people of Nepal. Yolmo is spoken predominantly in the Helambu and Melamchi valleys in northern Nuwakot District and northwestern Sindhupalchowk District. Dialects are also spoken by smaller populations in Lamjung District and Ilam District and also in Ramecchap District. It is very similar to Kyirong Tibetan and less similar to Standard Tibetan and Sherpa. There are approximately 10,000 Yolmo speakers, although some dialects have larger populations than others.

Modern Hebrew grammar is partly analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative, and accusative using prepositional particles rather than morphological cases.

This article is a description of the grammar of standardized Has Hlai, a Hlai language spoken on the island of Hainan, China by the Hlai (Li) ethnic group. The parts of speech are nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, numerals, adverbs, and pronouns.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Matthews, Stephen; Yip, Virginia (1994). Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar . London: Routledge. pp.  71–4, 229, 239. ISBN   0-415-08945-X.

General references