Dislocation (syntax)

Abstract: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1991.

Abstract: 0. Introduction. The limits of syntax have had more ups and downs over the past four decades than the stock market, which is presumably what inspired this volume and the workshop out of which it grew. The point of this paper is to make a plea for a return to a very restricted notion of syntax, whereby syntax neither follows from discourse function, as the 'iconicity' proponents would have us believe, nor encodes discourse function, as many mainstream syntacticians and semanticists currently presume. That is, I wish to argue contra Lancelot 1660, as cited in Chomsky's classic passage:

Abstract: This paper contains a discussion of (Italian) Right Dislocation, which seems to instantiate an optional anticipatory clitic pronoun. It will be shown that the distribution of the anticipatory pronoun is not free. When the clitic is absent, we do not have an instance of Right Dislocation, but of Marginalization. The structural analysis of Right Dislocation suggested here is similar to Kayne's (1994) analysis of English Right Dislocation, the structure of Marginalization contains an in situ; destressed constituent. Depending on how optionality is interpreted, it is possible to conclude that clitic pronouns are neither optional nor null.