Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Right dislocation (RD) is a common phenomenon found in many languages (e.g., Did you bring it, the wine?), whose syntax is much less studied than its mirroring counterpart, left dislocation (LD). While LD is generally agreed to involve an upward/leftward movement in the syntactic structure, various problems would arise if we treat RD as a kind of downward/rightward movement or right adjunction. Given recent progress in the cartographic research on sentence final particles and other left peripheral elements in different languages, it is important not to consider RD as an independent phenomenon, but as the result of multiple interacting operations. In this talk, we will present a case study of adverb RD in Mandarin Chinese which takes into account all the left peripheral elements involved in the derivation and provides a systematic explanation for all possible adverb RD variants. Other crosslinguistic RD types will also be mentioned.