The syntax, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of left- and right-dislocations in French

Abstract

Aspects of the syntax, pragmatics and sociolinguistic distribution of left- and right-dislocations in a corpus of spoken French are treated. Most tokens of both types have clear pragmatic motivation, two functions being common to both, with other functions particular to one or another type. The social distribution of weakly motivated tokens does not support the view that, as French moves toward verb-initial typology, dislocated subjects are being grammaticalized as ordinary subjects.