Left-dislocation and subordination in Avatime (Kwa)

Van Putten, Saskia

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Left-dislocation and subordination in Avatime (Kwa)

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Van Putten, Saskia
Syntax, Typology, and Information Structure, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Van Putten, S. (2014). Left-dislocation and subordination in Avatime (Kwa). In R. Van Gijn, J. Hammond, D. Matic, S. van Putten, & A.-V. Galucio (Eds.), Information Structure and Reference Tracking in Complex Sentences. (pp. 71-98). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0014-9B42-7

Abstract

Left dislocation is characterized by a sentence-initial element which is crossreferenced in the remainder of the sentence, and often set off by an intonation break. Because of these properties, left dislocation has been analyzed as an extraclausal phenomenon. Whether or not left dislocation can occur within subordinate clauses has been a matter of debate in the literature, but has never been checked against corpus data. This paper presents data from Avatime, a Kwa (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Ghana, showing that left dislocation occurs within subordinate clauses in spontaneous discourse. This poses a problem for the extraclausal analysis of left dislocation. I show that this problem can best be solved by assuming that Avatime allows the embedding of units larger than a clause