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Tizón-Couto, David
Left Dislocation in English
A Functional-Discoursal Approach
Series: Linguistic Insights - Volume 143
Year of Publication: 2012
Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2012. 416 pp.
ISBN 978-3-0343-1037-6 pb.
(Softcover)
Weight: 0.610 kg, 1.345 lbs
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Discipline
Book synopsis
This volume investigates Left Dislocation (LD) in the recent history of English, especially in the Late Modern English period, from the syntactic, semantic, informational and discourse-functional perspectives. Chapter 1 provides a workable definition of LD. A distinction is made between several different LD configurations within a gradient including a prototype and less central types by taking into account grammatical and compositional features. Chapter 2 reconsiders the semantic, informational and syntactic interpretations of the theme-topic interface and explores the role of LD as far as these three views are concerned. The informational and cognitive-functional features of left-dislocates are analysed as a set of quantifiable features, namely topicality (or topic persistence), information status and syntactic distributional features. Chapter 3 deals with the multifunctional character of LD at the discourse level. The main processing and interactive functions of LD are further specified by means of a typology of four major functions and four minor functions that relies on contextual features such as referentiality (Introductory or Forefronting), the semantic relationship between the dislocate and the copy (Narrowing or Contrastive), on general interactional circumstances (Acknowledge or Summarising) or on the speaker's attitude (Predicative or Correction).
Contents
Contents: Redefining Left Dislocation: Evidence from Late Modern English - Left Dislocation and the Theme-topic Interface - Discourse Functions of English LD.
About the author(s)/editor(s)
David Tizón-Couto is a postgraduate researcher for the Department of English, University of Vigo (Spain), and an instructor at the Official Language School in Vigo. He completed his PhD in 2011 on the syntactic, informational, functional and cognitive bases of left dislocation in recent English. His results have been disseminated in journals, collected volumes, and international conferences.
Series
Linguistic Insights. Studies in Language and Communication. Vol. 143
Edited by Maurizio Gotti