Materials on Left Dislocation

Book excerpt: Materials on Left Dislocation consists of two parts. Part I contains a selection of the main texts on which our present understanding of the Left Dislocation construction is based. For various reasons most of these texts had never been published, or are published in obsolete places. These articles, by Van Riemsdijk & Zwarts, Rodman, Hirschbuehler, Vat, Cinque and Zaenen, contain the first arguments that pertain to the major questions about Left Dislocation (for example whether movement or base-generation is involved), and they present the rationale for the now standard distinctions between Hanging Topic LD, Contrastive LD, and Clitic LD. In Part II a number of recent contributions to the grammar of Left Dislocation are brought together. In these articles, by Anagnostopoulou, Demirdache, Escobar, Van Hoof and Wiltschko, new aspects are being explored such as the relationship between LD and the grammar of focus and the role of clitic doubling and its semantic effects in Clitic LD. Furthermore, the empirical basis is broadened to encompass more languages. Finally, these articles explore the relationship between LD and a number of apparently unrelated constructions such as split topicalization. The book constitutes an indispensable tool for any linguist who seriously works on dislocation phenomena.