Dislocation (syntax)

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. 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): {{fs interlinear|lang=yue|indent=3|glossing=link Dislocation can result in the appearance of verb–object–subject (VOS) word order because no pronoun is used: {{fs interlinear|lang=yue|indent=3|abbreviations=SFP:sentence-final particle|glossing=link 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. Being a Chinese language, Cantonese is also a topic-prominent language and thus features left dislocation. For instance: {{fs interlinear|lang=yue|indent=3|glossing=link Topicalization can make this sentence appear to be object–subject–verb (OSV): {{fs interlinear|lang=yue|indent=3|glossing=link Both left and right dislocation can even be featured in the same sentence: {{fs interlinear|lang=yue|indent=3|abbreviations=SFP:sentence-final particle|glossing=link ==References==