Right-dislocation in Catalan: tails, polarity and activation

While our understanding has grown of the discourse role of rightdislocation (RD), there exists a class of RD (continuing RD) that have proven impervious to any principled analysis, for the role of the dislocate is (apparently) null, given that its referent appears immediately before the RD and, thus...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Mayol, Laia, Villalba, Xavier
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2013
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10230/43680
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/43680
http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18773109-13050104
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Right-dislocation
Information structure
Polarity
Discourse function
Descripción
Sumario:While our understanding has grown of the discourse role of rightdislocation (RD), there exists a class of RD (continuing RD) that have proven impervious to any principled analysis, for the role of the dislocate is (apparently) null, given that its referent appears immediately before the RD and, thus, simple pronominalisation should suffice to retrieve it. This paper aims to account for the pragmatic felicity conditions of continuing RD by looking at the role of polarity, an overlooked factor in previous work. Particularly, we will show that a significant amount of continuing RD involve the contradiction of part of the interlocutor’s common knowledge. Moreover, we will argue that RD does not have a single discourse function, but several: it can work as a ‘tail’ or as an activation mechanism.