Asturian and English in contrast: on dislocations

Abstract

This paper addresses the syntactic analysis of hanging or suspended topics, also known as left dislocations, in Asturian and English, from a transformational generative perspective. These structures are peripheral in both senses of the adjective: on the one hand, they are noun phrases that either introduce the topic or subject of predication, or else provide a framework for the attending proposition with which they appear, and therefore occur in the most peripheral

or leftmost part of the sentence. On the other hand, they are peripheral (or non-canonical) constructions insofar as they are considered part of spoken or informal language and, for this reason, they have traditionally been excluded from prescriptive grammars. However, their interest in syntax is unquestionable. The article offers a host of empirical arguments from Asturian and English that lead to the inescapable conclusion that, despite superficial appearances, the hanging topic and the host sequence with which it co-occurs are part of two independent clauses, paratactically related to one another. Therefore, dislocations are extra-sentential elements, and the observed syntactic behavior is precisely what would be expected: that of two autonomously generated sentences. The paper also tackles an intriguing contrast between Asturian and English regarding hanging topics in what seems like subordinate clauses: while in English, dependent hanging topics can occur with a reduplicated that complementizer or not, in Asturian, as in Spanish, subordinate hanging topics routinely appear with a secondary que complementizer. Likewise, Asturian offers data demonstrating the possibility of a free restart without a subordinating verb. It is shown once again that an analysis of complementizer reduplication that assumes two underlying sentences behind the scenes is superior to existing mono-sentential alternatives in the literature while deriving a number of correct empirical predictions.