Extern constructions in English¹

I wish to express my gratitude to the other Australian members of the team engaged in the project (funded by an ARC grant) to prepare The Cambridge Grammar of English, David Lee, Pam Peters and Peter Peterson, for stimulating discussions on issues raised here. I am particularly indebted to the team's director, Rodney Huddleston, for suggesting a number of the ideas developed in the paper, and for his critical comments on an earlier draft. I accept sole responsibility for any remaining deficiencies. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 1991 ALS Conference at the University of Queensland.

Abstract

This paper explores the similarities and differences between those constructions commonly regarded as being derived via the processes of ‘left‐dislocation’, ‘right‐dislocation’ and ‘topicalisation’. The constructions are here claimed to share in common the presence of an element ‘external’ to the governing clause, but to exhibit certain differences both in terms of their structural properties (notably, the types of syntactic function represented by the external element in the governing clause), and in terms of their communicative discourse properties. Left extern constructions foreground an element which, in the vast majority of cases, serves as a topic‐expression. One type generally serves to redirect the flow of the discourse by reintroducing a lapsed topic and presenting new information relevant to that topic via the governing clause. The other type generally serves to maintain the flow of discourse by preserving a current discourse topic and offering little in the way of communicatively significant comment about it. The right extern construction typically serves to express a proposition about a contextually salient entity, and then reinforces the identity of the topic‐entity for purposes of clarification or emphasis.

Notes

I wish to express my gratitude to the other Australian members of the team engaged in the project (funded by an ARC grant) to prepare The Cambridge Grammar of English, David Lee, Pam Peters and Peter Peterson, for stimulating discussions on issues raised here. I am particularly indebted to the team's director, Rodney Huddleston, for suggesting a number of the ideas developed in the paper, and for his critical comments on an earlier draft. I accept sole responsibility for any remaining deficiencies. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 1991 ALS Conference at the University of Queensland.