Re: What is this construction

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@R...>
wrote:
> English occasionally uses a sentence structure of the form
>
> Pronoun Verb Object, Aux Subject
>
> Where Aux is a form of "to do" or "to be" (or possibly another modal).
> For example,
>
> He liked languages, did Tolkien.
>
> It may be a particularly Northern English form. Does anyone know what
such
> a construction is called?
>
> Pete
Hi, Pete.

The following is a direct quote:

", and some languages also have a RIGHT-DETACHED POSITION, [RDP], which
is the position of the post-clausal element in a right-dislocation
construction. "

It is a direct quote from the following URL:

http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/research/rrg/rrg_paper.html

What you have there is a kind of comment-topic construction, in which
a complete clause, whose subject is a cataphoric pronoun, is the
comment, and its topic is postponed to it as another clause whose
subject is the noun phrase that is the "ante"cedent of the cataphor,
and whose predicate is just a "pro-verb" anaphorically standing in
for the predicate of the first clause.

But, those are /my/ words.
What I called a "comment-topic construction",
Role-and-Reference Grammarians call
"a right-dislocation construction";
what I called the "postponed topic",
R&R Grammarians call "a post-clausal element";
and the place to put it, they call "the Right-Detached Position",
or "the RDP" for short.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's some other translations from
High-School Grammar to Chomskyese to RRGese to "Tom"ese:

Verb ................. Verb ........ Nucleus .. Verb ...

Other stuff that ..... Complements . Core ..... Terms ..
has to be added to.... ............. Arguments. ........
make a complete ...... ............. .......... ........
clause ............... ............. .......... ........

Extra modifiers and .. Specifiers .. Peripheral Adjuncts
phrases .............. ............. Arguments. ........

---------------------------------------------------------------------

As for the question, how common these constructions are:
They don't sound weird to me.
I have been in 26 states of the U.S. of America (including Hawaii but
not Alaska), in the District of Columbia (U.S.A.'s Federal District),
in England (London area), and in various states of India, including
parts where missionaries from all over the British Commonwealth of
Nations lived; plus, I'm not very good at telling apart "what I've
heard" from "what I've read", so I can't really tell you whether
these right-shifted comment-first-topic-second constructions are
peculiar to one dialect and/or one register, or not.  All I can say
is, somewhere or other they became familiar to me; chances are,
before I first visited Australia.

Tom H.C. in MI