Re: YAEDT? Syntax in dialects of English (was: Of accents & dialects (was: Azurian phonology)

On Oct 25, 2008, at 4:56 AM, Sam Pointon wrote:

> The other form has something interesting going on. Punctuated, it is
> "He's a good man, is Tony Blair". You also hear "He's a good man, Tony
> Blair is" though this version has less emphasis on 'Tony Blair'. This
> usage seems to be limited to 'can', 'should', 'could', 'would', 'has',
> 'will', 'be' and 'do', eg it's "He plays down the right wing, Jack
> does" as opposed to *"He plays down the right wing, Jack plays" which
> sounds ungrammatical. There's also "She'll go to the shops, she will",
> "He's scored three goals, he has", and "He can play up front, he can".
> I can't think of any examples where the verb in the second clause
> isn't one of those.
How common are those expressions? I have been been toying with a very
similar phenomenon for a while to make verbs in an SOV diachronic
conlang develop conjugational suffixes. For example:

Bill cello plays he does > Bill cello plays.3s
I letter wrote I did > I letter wrote.1s-past

I.e. the words for "he does"/"I did"/etc. would fuse with the verb,
first as clitics and then as suffixes. But I've been wondering about
whether it's realistic to expect such phrases to ever be so common as
to become obligatory (and under what circumstances that could happen).