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

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...


-Stephen (Steg)

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