Left Dislocation in Hawrami and its Information Structure

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of English and Linguistics, Faculty of Language and Literature, University of Kurdistan

2 Linguistics student, Department of English Language and Literature and Linguistics, Faculty of Language and Literature, University of Kurdistan

Abstract

Left Dislocation (LD) refers to the syntactic phenomenon in which an element is moved from its underlying position and placed at the beginning of the clause. A resumptive element occupies the underlying position of the LD-ed element. A primary objective of this study is to identify and investigate different types of Left dislocation constructions in Hawrami dialect, emphasizing their information structure. The research method is descriptive-analytical and data elicitation was conducted through interviews with native speakers. The data demonstrates that there exist two types of dislocation, that is, Clitic Left Dislocation and Contrastive Left Dislocation. Specifically, three main information functions are identified for Left Dislocation constructions: aboutness topic, contrastive topic and focus. In addition, Clitic Doubling and Topicalization as two constructions displaying surface resemblances to the Left Dislocation construction are discussed. Upon closer inspection, the identity hypothesis of Left Dislocation and Clitic Doubling is rejected.

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References

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