Re: Redundant pronouns (was: "Tagalog,it's got a Trigger System," She Said)

Pablo Flores wrote:

> Matt Pearson <mpearson@...> wrote:
> > Steg Belsky wrote:
> >
> [snip]
> > >
> > > 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.
>
> Only when the argument is the object, not the subject as in the
> examples
> above. If you say "Ton ami, il n'est pas chez moi", you have "il"
> ("he")
> replacing "ton ami".
Unstressed subject pronouns like "je" and "il" are what I mean by
'light'
pronouns (as opposed to 'heavy' pronouns like "moi" and "lui").
Although
not clitics per se, they appear to be drifting towards clitic status,
and may
eventually become reanalysed as subject agreement prefixes.

Matt.