Re: "Tagalog, it's got a Trigger System," She Said (was; QUESTION-New project)

Steg Belsky wrote:

>On Sun, 14 Feb 1999 23:23:53 +0100 Kristian Jensen
<kljensen@...>
>writes:
>>
>>transl.: "The man, he cut some wood in the forest"
>
>>-Kristian- 8-)
>>
>
>I speak like that in English normally, and people around me do
>too.....is it known whether this kind of construction, like "my
>mother, she told me to go to the store" is regional (NYC?) or
>ethnic (Jewish?), because as far as i know, it's grammatically
>incorrect, even though i hear it around here all the time, and my
>brother said that he doesn't think people in other areas use this
>construction.
>
>The type of construction, specifically, is where a pronoun
>representing the subject of the sentence is placed into a sentence
>where the subject is already specified, e.g.:
>
>My brother, he told me people in other places don't talk like this.
>His friend Ari, she lives in Jersey.
>Those stupid tourists, they clog up the subways.
>The computer, it broke.
>
>(as opposed to "My brother told me...", "His friend Ari lives in
>Jersey", etc.)
>
>For some reason it looks so much weirder in writing than it sounds
>spoken...
The phenomenon is not as wierd as you think. If I'm not mistaken,
Hebrew itself is one of those languages that use a pronoun as a
copular in predicate nominal clauses. So the use of this method is
probably ethnic Jewish, eh?

BTW, when I translated the Tagalog examples into English, I believe
that the best literal translations would be a clause that is
essentially a predicate nominal clause (ie., clauses with only one
core argument) and not a clause with two core arguments. But since
its more _not_ normal for English sentences with with more than two
arguments to be structured as a predicate nominal clause, the best
translations would have to be one where a pronoun representing the
subject of the sentence is placed into a sentence where the subject
is already specified. You might have noticed in fact that I made two
translations for each Tagalog example, eg.:

lit.: "The man is the cutter of wood in the forest"
transl.: "The man, he cut wood in the forest"

-Kristian- 8-)