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

Steg Belsky wrote:

> 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.
There's nothing remotely strange or 'grammatically incorrect' about this

construction at all.  It even has a name among linguists: "Left
Dislocation"
(viz. moving one of the verb's arguments to the left edge of the clause
and 'replacing' it with the appropriate pronoun).  French and Italian
also have this construction, although in those languages the left-
dislocated element is replaced with a clitic or 'light' pronoun rather
than a full stressed pronoun.

English, French, and Italian also have Right Dislocation:

    I love him, that man of mine
    I've never met him before, that crazy brother of yours

Somehow, these sound best to me when the right dislocated
element is introduced by a demonstrative like "that".  It sounds
strange to say "I've never met him before, your brother", unless
"your brother" is being added as an afterthought.

In French you even find multiple left- and right-dislocations
in the same sentence, producing things like "Your brother,
has he read it, that book?".

Matt.