Left-dislocated constituents in the recent history of English: features and decline

What is it about?

This paper lookes into the syntactic, semantic and textual behaviour of left-detached constituents in a large body of texts of different genres in the recent history of English. The behaviour of ‘LDet-sequences’ in written historical texts (since the Early Modern English period) is compared with the behaviour of Left Dislocation (LDis: London, I love it) in contemporary spoken English.

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Why is it important?

LDis and LDet-sequences do not only front given (vs. new) items more frequently in Modern English written texts, but they can also be claimed to do so more successfully: the left-detached referent persists for an average of 2.32 clauses and, thus, cohesively expands beyond the clause containing the resumptive element, i.e. into the paragraph. This outcome reinforces the assumption that the (co)referential networks created in the written medium quantitively and qualitatively exceed those usually provided in the spoken language. As for genre, LDet- sequences show up far more frequently in speech-related genres (drama and fiction) than in any other genre. Last, only the diachronic evolution of LDet-sequences that most closely resemble LDis concurs with previously reported declining trends for left-detached constituents (cf. Pérez Guerra & Tizón-Couto 2009).