Left dislocation Sample Clauses

Left dislocation. PATIENTS and Locative Obliques have been observed in left dislocations, where the topic-marked referent occurs in sentence-initial position and realized at a higher tone register, maintained across a portion of or the entire dislocated phrase.105 The need for special topic marking such as left dislocation arises in several situations, such as when a referent has inactive status due to a relatively long gap between mentions or no previous mention at all, or in some cases of topic shift. Furthermore, non-agent referents usually require special topic marking. Left dislocation usually involves relativized nominals as in (16.7), in which the PATIENT is Topic. This referent is mentioned five sentences earlier, but becomes inactive, as there are three different Topics between mentions. The Topic of the previous sentence is ‘the first four’, referring to those who earned the award of a helicopter ride. The in situ Object pronoun likely occurs because the antecedent is human. This is suggested by the observation made in §11.1.1 that human Objects are subject to special syntactic requirements such as being restricted from Object ellipsis.