Timeline for Sentence with two not-so-related parts
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 15, 2012 at 13:45 | comment | added | Barrie England | @tchrist. Topicalization seems to be what the LSGSWE refers to as fronting, but it is not quite the same thing as dislocation. Rather, it means ‘placing in initial position a clause element which is normally placed after the verb.’ An example might be ‘This I do not understand.’ Utterances such as Me, I’m ready or Him, he’s not getting any look like special cases of dislocation, where the definite noun phrase at the beginning also happens to be a pronoun. | |
| Nov 15, 2012 at 13:29 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | I believe I may have also heard this construct referred to as topicalization, where the preface noun phrase establishes the topic for the subsequent co-referential pronoun. But that wouldn’t explain “Me, I’m ready” or “Him, he’s not getting any.” | |
| Nov 15, 2012 at 13:00 | comment | added | Amir E. Aharoni | This sounds kinda right, but I can't browse that book on Amazon, and I can't find the definition of "preface" elsewhere (I tried several books about English grammar on Questia). If there's nothing else online, I guess that I'll try to find it in a library. | |
| Nov 15, 2012 at 11:47 | comment | added | Barrie England | @StoneyB: Yes, that too. | |
| Nov 15, 2012 at 11:45 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | I think this construction is probably more characteristic of journalistic than academic prose. You see it particularly when a reporter feels a need to remind readers who the subject is, and why the subject is 'newsworthy'. | |
| Nov 15, 2012 at 8:29 | comment | added | Noah | And I think this one of those examples where dangling participles could easily happen. | |
| Nov 15, 2012 at 8:19 | history | answered | Barrie England | CC BY-SA 3.0 |