French dislocation without movement

Publication Summary

This paper revisits the classic tests for movement that have been proposed in the literature on dislocated structures, arguing that discourse factors have a significant impact on the outcome of such tests. On this basis, French dislocation is shown to be a syntactically unified phenomenon involving both Left- and Right-Dislocation, irrespective of whether it is resumed by a clitic or a non-clitic element. The epitome of interface phenomena, French dislocation is argued to be the output of the interaction between syntax and the discourse component, requiring only a very limited contribution of narrow syntax: all that is required is that the dislocated element be merged by adjunction to a Discourse Projection (defined as a maximal projection with root properties). No agreement or checking of a designated (e.g. topic) feature is necessary, hence no syntactic movement of any sort need be postulated. The so-called resumptive element is argued to be a full-fledged pronoun rather than a true syntactic resumptive. The relation between the dislocated element and its resumptive is captured in terms of discourse coreference. The core syntactic and interpretive properties of left- and right-dislocation are shown to be identical; differences between the two configurations are shown to derive straightforwardly from the properties of the two sides of the clause periphery.