The goal of the paper is to propose a holistic analysis of the discourse properties and the interpretational effects of pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian. Previous research has suggested that this is a topic construction, and it has been shown that the right-dislocated pronoun may affect reference assignment, is sometimes used in cases of discourse breaks, is associated with contrastiveness, and may lead to interpretational effects such as “emphasis” and “mitigation”. Based on Norwegian authentic corpus material, Givón’s (
Right-dislocation is the phenomenon in which a sentence-internal nominal phrase co-occurs with a coreferential phrase to the right of the sentence, and the two expressions share argument role. The phenomenon is illustrated by the italicized sentence in (1) (
(1) | Below the waterfall (and this was the most astonishing sight of all), a whole mass of enormous glass pipes were dangling down into the river from somewhere high up in the ceiling! They really were |
According to Ziv (
(2) | ( |
*The picture is beautiful, it. |
Ziv explains the illformedness of (2) by claiming that the pronominal form and the right-dislocation construction contribute conflicting information: Whereas the unaccented personal pronoun signals that the referent is maximally accessible, the right-dislocation construction signals that the referent is
Although seemingly plausible for standard English, Ziv’s explanation for the illformedness of (2) is not in accordance with the fact that pronominal right-dislocation is fully acceptable in some languages, e.g. Norwegian (
The authentic example in (3), from Borthen (
(3) | (The speaker is talking about her son, who has a handicap) |
Ja, det hender nok jeg kan være sårbar på Torkilds annerledeshet. Men kanskje sårer det meg mer at folk som kommer til oss hilser på både Ingrid Elise og meg, men i sin ubetenksomhet «glemmer» Torkild. |
|
‘Yes, I guess it does happen that I am being vulnerable because of Torkild being different. But what hurts me the most, I think, is that people who visit us say hello to Ingrid Elise and me, but thoughtlessly «forget» Torkild. |
The grammaticality of examples such as (3) means that the illformedness of (2) cannot be due to inherent and general properties of pronouns and the right-dislocation construction
As the literature review in section 2 will show, a variety of linguistic parameters have been proposed as being relevant to pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian. These include discourse-related properties such as topicality, reference maintenance, reference assignment, discourse (dis)continuity, and contrast. In addition, it has been observed that the construction often has specific interpretational effects, sometimes described as “emphasis” and “mitigation” (
That right-dislocation in general can have affective, attitudinal or interpersonal effects has been observed for other languages as well (see e.g. Ashby 1988;
We argue with Givón (
The analysis is based mainly on authentic corpus material. We have performed a reanalysis of 289 examples of pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian, first presented and analyzed in Borthen (
In the next section, we present a literature review on Norwegian pronominal right-dislocation, structured according to the most central themes in the literature. We elaborate on several problems and puzzles that have remained partly unresolved until now, and the section gives an overview of insights and remaining questions. In section 3, we present our analysis, with a focus on the connection between the construction’s discourse properties and its interpretational effects. Section 4 concludes the paper and points to some topics for further research.
There is consensus in the literature that pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian is connected to topicality (see
A sentence topic can be described informally as “what the sentence is about”, as opposed to “what is predicated about the topic” (cf.
Reinhart points out that a sentence topic is typically but not necessarily realized as the subject of the clause and as definite or pronominal, and it is typically but not necessarily already given in the discourse. The tendency for topics to represent given information (with potential effects on syntactic function and nominal form) can be seen as a secondary effect of its cognitive function as a “memory tag”: It is more efficient to successively store information under one memory tag which is repeated in subsequent sentences, than to constantly change the locus for the representation of the new information.
Reinhart (
As described in Borthen (
(4)
A:
Nevn en lingvist.
‘Mention a linguist.’
B1:
Chomsky
Chomsky
er
is
lingvist.
linguist
‘Chomsky is a linguist.’
B2:
#Chomskyi
Chomsky
er
is
lingvist,
linguist
he
‘Chomsky is a linguist.’
(5)
A:
Hvilket yrke har Noam Chomsky? Er ikke han politiker?
‘What occupation does Noam Chomsky have? Isn’t he a politician?’
B:
Nei.
no
Chomskyi
Chomsky
er
is
lingvist,
linguist
he
‘No. Chomsky is a linguist.’
As Borthen points out, a crucial difference between the unacceptable answer (4B2) and B’s answer in (5), has to do with information structure. In (5), the referent of the right-dislocated pronoun and its correlate is part of the topic settled by A’s question, and pronominal right-dislocation is natural. In (4), the referent of the right-dislocated pronoun and its correlate is part of the utterance’s comment, and pronominal right-dislocation is not natural.
There are also syntactic pieces of evidence that suggest that pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian is a topic construction. As first observed by Askedal (
(6)
a.
(Sentence-initial subject correlate)
Vii
we
skal ha
will have
pizza
pizza
til
for
middag,
dinner
we
‘We are going to have pizza for dinner.’
b.
(Non-initial subject correlate)
Pizzaen
pizza.
skal
will
vii
we
ha
have
til
for
middag,
dinner
we
‘The pizza we will have for dinner.’
(7)
a.
(Fronted object correlate)
Pizzaeni
pizza.
skal
will
vi
we
ha
have
til
for
middag,
dinner
it.
‘The pizza we will have for dinner.’
b.
(Non-fronted object correlate)
*Vi
we
skal
will
ha
have
pizzaeni
pizza.
til
for
middag,
dinner
it.
‘The pizza we will have for dinner.’
Since subjects and fronted objects are more typical topic expressions than are canonical objects (see e.g.
Other syntactic patterns point in the same direction. For instance, it is not possible to right-dislocate a Norwegian expletive pronoun (cf.
A construction that is compatible with pronominal right-dislocation is left-dislocation. As illustrated by the authentic example in (8) (
(8)
Men
but
[Vibeke
Vibeke
og
and
han]i,
he
dei
they
var
were
ikke
not
slik,
such
they
‘But he and Vibeke, they were not like that.’
Left-dislocation is assumed to encode the sentence topic in Norwegian (
The data in (4)–(8) above are as expected, given the hypothesis that a right-dislocated pronoun encodes the sentence topic. However, some authors claim that there is also some counter evidence. Askedal (
(9)
Peri
Per
trenger
needs
omsorg
care
he
også.
too
‘Also Per needs care.’
According to Borthen (
Another unresolved question that the previous accounts do not solve, is the following: Since the correlate of the right-dislocated pronoun is necessarily a subject or a fronted object – which are prototypical topic expressions (see e.g.
Borthen (
The form of right-dislocated pronouns and their correlates.
Sum | ||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pronoun | 79 | 40 | 10 | 3 | 1 | 61 | 9 | 0 | 4 | 207 (72%) |
Ø (zero) | 7 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 13 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 41 (14%) |
Proper name | – | – | 13 | 2 | 2 | 1 | – | – | 4 | 22 (8%) |
Definite |
– | – | 1 | 1 | 8 | 2 | – | – | 3 | 15 (5%) |
Indefinite |
– | – | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | – | – | 3 | 3 (1 %) |
Sentence | – | – | – | – | – | 1 | – | – | – | 1 |
Sum | 86 | 60 | 24 | 6 | 11 | 78 | 9 | 1 | 14 | 289 (100%) |
According to
One example from the data in
(10) | Du, mennesker gir seg ikke tid til å være inaktive. Det er synd. For det skjer så utrolig mye positivt når man tillater seg ro. Alle blomster må jo hvile før de kan blomstre. |
‘You see, people do not allow themselves to be inactive. That is a pity. Because so many positive things happen when you allow yourself peace. After all, all flowers must rest before they can bloom. |
The referent of the right-dislocated pronoun in (10) is new to the discourse. This example and the numbers in
As for the specific type of right-dislocated pronouns,
To sum up, the correlate of a Norwegian right-dislocated pronoun tends to be pronominal or zero but it may have other forms. Overall, there does not seem to be anything special about the correlate’s form in sentences with pronominal right-dislocation compared to that which is expected for canonical subjects (and fronted objects) in oral speech in Norwegian.
Even though there is nothing special about the nominal forms involved in pronominal right-dislocation, the construction may still be systematically linked to referent accessibility, thereby influencing reference assignment. Fretheim (
(11)
(
A:
Det der er en hoggorm.
‘That’s a viper’
B:
Nei.
no
Den
it.
har
has
et
a
siksakband
zigzag.band
over
down
ryggen.
back.
‘No. It has a zigzag band down its back.’
(12)
(
A:
Det der er en hoggorm.
‘That’s a viper’
B:
Nei.
no
Deni
that.
har et siksakband
has a zigzag.band
over
down
ryggen,
back.
that.
‘No. The viper has a zigzag band down its back.’
Whereas the subject
As Fretheim (
In focus > | Activated > | Familiar > | Uniquely identifiable > | Referential > | Type identifiable |
indef. |
|||||
According to this model, various determiners and pronominal forms conventionally signal one of the six cognitive statuses on the Givenness Hierarchy as part of their semantics. Since the higher statuses entail the lower ones, the prediction is that a nominal form is appropriate when the referent has the cognitive status that the nominal form encodes (and is placed under in the model), or any higher cognitive status. Based on data such as (11) and (12), Fretheim (
Although we agree in Fretheim’s intuitions concerning the interpretations of (11) and (12), we find his explanation questionable. If his analysis were correct, there should be a systematic difference with respect to the cognitive status of pronominal subjects and fronted objects that occur alone and those that occur with an accompanying right-dislocated pronoun, but Fretheim presents no corpus study or any authentic examples to back up his analysis. On the contrary, his analysis is based on one single constructed example. There is also a more fundamental problem with Fretheim’s approach. In the Givenness Hierarchy framework, each nominal form is stipulated to encode a cognitive status as part of the determiner’s or pronoun’s semantics. This means that the correlation between a form and a cognitive status is specified in the mental lexicon. According to Fretheim’s approach, all pronouns would have to be listed at least twice in the lexicon; once with the cognitive status they encode alone and a second time with the cognitive status they encode as the correlate of a right-dislocated pronoun. If the same approach is assumed for each type of correlate (indefinite, definite, demonstrative etc.), this will result in a very high number of discontinuous nominal forms in the lexicon, and the number would be even further multiplied with different types of right-dislocated constituents. We take this approach to be cognitively implausible, both because it seems unnecessarily stipulative and because it is not clear that it would even be possible to state a different semantics for each type of combination of correlate and right-dislocated constituent.
The conclusion of this section is that a right-dislocated pronoun may in some exceptional cases affect reference assignment, but the function of pronominal right-dislocation must be something else than encoding cognitive status in Gundel et al.’s (
Another approach to pronominal right-dislocation is put forth by Averintseva-Klisch (
(13) | (And when the king lost his wife, Dutitre pitied him: “Dear me, I should say, for you things aren’t that easy either […].”) |
Siei war ein Original, [die Madame Dutitre]i. | |
shei was an original the Madame Dutitrei | |
‘She was an original, Madame Dutitre’ |
As for pronominal right-dislocation in languages such as Norwegian, Averintseva-Klisch (
We see no theoretical obstacle to Averintseva-Klisch’s analysis, but it needs empirical support. To test its validity, we performed a quantitative corpus study. We selected the 207 text excerpts with pronominal correlates in
(14) | a. | (Corpus data with pronominal right-dislocation) |
En gang i tiden var tekstil og konfeksjon Norges største landbaserte industri. Der Bergens-regionen var et dynamisk tyngdepunkt. Det er lenge siden |
||
‘Previously, textile and clothing were Norway’s largest land-based industry. With the Bergen region as a dynamic centre. That’s a long time ago, |
||
b. | (Corpus data without pronominal right-dislocation) | |
Gustav mente at for ti år siden hadde de nok syntes det var morsomt å base i snøen på haugen også, og la seg rulle nedover skråningen til de kunne skremme folk på gaten som levende snømenn, |
||
‘Gustav was of the opinion that ten years ago, they would have found it amusing to play in the snow on the heap, too, and roll down the hill and scare people in the streets as living snowmen, |
Reference maintenance was measured by counting the number of sentences in which the target referent was mentioned subsequently, within a limit of five sentences. In (14a) and (14b), none of the referents of the target pronouns (
We did not find any significant difference between the two categories with respect to subsequent mention. For both categories the average number for subsequent reference within the 5 next sentences is close to 1, i.e. 0,99 for examples with pronominal right-dislocation and 1,09 for canonical pronouns. Thus, according to our investigation, pronominal right-dislocation does not increase the likelihood of subsequent mention of the referent, which is contrary to what one might expect from Averintseva-Klisch’ (
There are also some differences between (14a) and (14b) that have no explanation on Averintseva-Klisch’ account. (14a), with a right-dislocated pronoun, has an emphatic interpretation not found in (14b), and intuitively, there is a lower degree of discourse coherence between the target sentence and the previous discourse in (14a) than in (14b). These differences between (14a) and (14b) are not coincidental on our account.
Fretheim (
(15)
A:
I dag snakket jeg med en som kjente deg fra den tida da du bodde på Kirkenær – Axel Aarvoll.
‘Today I spoke with someone who knew you from the period when you were living in Kirkenær – Axel Aarvoll.’
B1:
Hani
he
var
was
gift
married
med
with
søskenbarnet
cousin.
mitt
mine
en
one
gang
time
i
in
tida,
time.
he
‘He was once married to my first cousin,
B2:
#Han
he
var
was
gift
married
med
with
søskenbarnet
cousin.
mitt
mine
en
one
gang
time
i
in
tida.
time.
‘He was once married to my first cousin.’
If person A had continued to talk about what happened when A met Axel Aarvoll, using an unaccented pronoun in subject position without a right-dislocated pronoun would have been the natural choice. But as Fretheim points out, when person B interrupts A’s story by mentioning that Axel has been married to his second cousin, using a right-dislocated pronoun is more coherent than not. According to Fretheim, it is the new turn in the story that triggers and favors the use of the right-dislocated pronoun. Similar authentic data are presented in Borthen (
Data such as those in (15) illustrate that pronominal right-dislocation is particularly natural in cases of minor breaks in the discourse, but so far, it has not been clear how to connect this fact to the other properties of the construction, such as its assumed status as a topic construction. In section 3, we will argue that pronominal right-dislocation is not only a topic construction, but a
Borthen (
(16) | – Det er jævla å være separert? Det kom som et spørsmål. Jeg visste ikke hva jeg skulle svare. – Syns egentlig det er ok, |
‘– It’s awful to be separated? It was formulated as a question. I didn’t know what to answer. – In fact, (I) think it is ok, |
In (16), the speaker’s view that it is ok to be separated opposes the addressee’s implicated view that it must be awful to be separated, and this contrastive meaning aspect is highlighted by the right-dislocated pronoun. Another example discussed in Borthen (
(17) | De kommer gjerne et par dager før de skal lese opp, for å nyte luksusen. Ja, Ingvar Ambjørnsen kommer tre-fire dager før, |
‘They [the authors] usually arrive a couple of days ahead of the performance, to enjoy the luxury. That is, Ingvar Ambjørnsen arrives three to four days ahead, |
(17) describes two facts that can be perceived of as contrasting. Whereas most of the authors arrive two days ahead of the performance, Ingvar Ambjørnsen arrives 3–4 days in advance. The use of a right-dislocated pronoun is particularly natural in this context, and its presence emphasizes the contrast between the behavior of Ambjørnsen and the other authors.
(18) below illustrates that a sentence with a right-dislocated pronoun may achieve a contrastive interpretation even in cases where this contrast is not licensed by the preceding context.
(18) | Solen er varm – den kaster sine varme stråler på ham, men så må han ikke sitte her lenger. Han må videre. For han har likesom ikke lov til å sitte slik i solen, |
‘The sun is hot – it is throwing its warm rays onto him, but now he cannot sit here any longer. He must continue. Because he is sort of not allowed to sit like this in the sun, |
As reported on in Borthen (
There are many types of contrast. According to Borthen (
(19) | There is contrast between two propositions |
( |
The idea behind (19) is that a right-dislocated pronoun that is part of an utterance used to communicate a proposition
(19) underspecifies how accessible the contrasting proposition
Borthen’s formulation of (19) is, however, not entirely accurate. Given that the sentence predicate is the locus for the negation, it is not correct to say that
In section 3, we propose a refined version of Borthen’s (
The interpretational effects of pronominal right-dislocation have been described in various ways in the Norwegian literature. Askedal (
According to Borthen (
Example (3) in section 1 illustrates this point. The utterance with a right-dislocated pronoun in (3) is repeated in (20a) below. The utterance’s propositional content
(20) | a. | Han er liksom ikke medregnet, han. |
‘He sort of doesn’t count, |
||
b. | Torkild does not count (p) | |
c. | Other people count (q) |
One effect of the right-dislocated pronoun in (3) is that the speaker appears as more emotionally hurt than she would have without the right-dislocated pronoun. Borthen’s explanation for this is that the presence of a right-dislocated pronoun instructs the addressee to look for a contrastive interpretation as defined in (19), which leads to pragmatic inferences. In (3),
In (17) and (18), the right-dislocated pronouns have a slightly different type of emphasis effect, but Borthen’s (ibid.) explanation is the same. The target utterances are represented in (21a) and (22a), together with the contrasting propositions in (21bc) and (22bc).
(21) | a. | Ingvar Ambjørnsen ankommer 3–4 dager før, han. |
‘Ingvar Ambjørnsen arrives 3–4 days ahead, |
||
b. | Ingvar Ambjørnsen arrives 3–4 days ahead of the performance (p) | |
c. | The other authors do not arrive 3–4 days ahead of the performance (q) |
(22) | a. | Han har liksom ikke lov til å sitte slik i solen, han. |
‘He is not allowed to sit like this in the sun, |
||
b. | He is not allowed to sit like this in the sun (p) | |
c. | Other people are allowed to sit like this in the sun (q) |
As argued in Borthen (
As mentioned earlier, pronominal right-dislocation can also have a mitigating function (cf.
The previous research can be summarized by six observations and remaining questions. First, unmodified and unaccented right-dislocated pronouns have been convincingly argued to always pick out the sentence topic. However, it is not clear how this can be reconciled with the fact that right-dislocated pronouns can sometimes be accented and modified by focus adverbs, in which case they do not represent the sentence topic. Moreover, it is not clear why there is a need to mark a default topic (subject or fronted object) as the topic. Secondly, a right-dislocated pronoun can sometimes affect reference assignment, but only rarely so. We have argued that this cannot be due to encoded cognitive status, but an alternative explanation for the observed effects is missing so far. Third, it has been proposed that the construction marks the present and upcoming discourse topic, which may be hypothesized to affect subsequent mentioning, but this hypothesis has failed to be empirically verified. Fourth, the construction is sometimes, but not always, used in connection with discourse breaks. Although descriptively unquestionable, it is unclear how this fact is related to other properties of the construction. Fifth, the construction often, but not always, gives rise to a specific type of contrastive interpretation, and it has been argued that this may lead to various pragmatic effects. However, one main challenge is to connect contrastiveness to the construction’s remaining properties. And sixth, there is a need for a more explicit account of when the construction achieves the various interpretational effects, especially the emphasizing and mitigating functions, which at first glance seem incompatible. More generally, there is so far no account that successfully ties the construction’s many properties together.
In the next sections, we will leave the grammatical details of the construction to further investigations and take for granted that unaccented, nonmodified right-dislocated pronouns have to have subject or fronted object correlates, and necessarily represent the sentence topic. The main contribution of our analysis is twofold. First, we will show that there is a rationale behind the fact that right-dislocated unaccented and nonmodified pronouns encode the sentence topic whereas other types of right-dislocated constituents may have a different information structure status. And secondly, we will argue that there is a connection between the construction’s status as a specific type of topic construction and its effects on discourse coherence and interpretation.
Givón (
Givón (ibid.) defines markedness such that the more phonological material, the more semantic material, and the greater morphological or syntactic complexity a linguistic form involves, the more marked it is. In line with this, hierarchies such as (23) below can be derived and used to predict whether a construction will typically be used in cases of relative continuity and predictability or the opposite (cf.
(23)
M
M
According to (23), zero elements and unaccented pronouns will be used when a referent is highly accessible and the discourse highly continuous, whereas e.g. the cleft construction is predicted to be used in cases of low degree of accessibility and predictability, i.e. when the clefted constituent represents new, unpredictable information.
Givón (
The degree of predictability and continuity in Givón’s model is measured relative to what would be the case for the language’s more unmarked constructions. For instance, the b-versions in (24) and (25) below, with right- and left-dislocated constituents, are more marked than the a-versions, since they contain more phonological and semantic material and involve greater syntactic complexity.
(24) | a. | They are really pretty. |
b. | Theyi are really pretty, [those carpets]i. |
(25) | a. | He never showed up. |
b. | Peteri, hei never showed up. |
Being more marked, the prediction is that the b-versions will tend to occur in cases with a lower degree of continuity and predictability than the a-versions, for instance in cases where the subject referent has not been mentioned recently.
Givón (
According to Givón’s (
(26)
M
M
Since pronominal right-dislocation is a more marked form than the corresponding structure without the right-dislocated pronoun, it signals a lower degree of predictability and continuity of the two. At the same time, it is a construction that encodes the sentence topic, and the right-dislocated pronoun is less marked than other right-dislocated constituents, due to its “light” phonology and rudimentary semantics. This is compatible with cases where the target referent is a sentence topic that is just less than maximally predictable and continuous, e.g. recently mentioned but not identical to the previous sentence topic.
In all the examples that we have presented in this paper pronominal right-dislocation involves a topic shift in the sense that the current sentence topic (identified by the right-dislocated pronoun) is different from the sentence topic of the previous sentence. There are some exceptions, but the same tendency is found for the whole data set represented in
In what follows, we will show that this analysis accounts for the properties summarized in section 2.6, including right-dislocated pronouns’ (rare) co-occurrence with focus adverbs, the construction’s possible (but rare) effect on reference assignment, its use with minor discourse breaks, its contrastive aspect, and interpretational effects.
The degree of nonpredictability and discontinuity signaled by linguistic forms on a scale such as (26) will be determined by the constituent’s degree of markedness, phonologically, morphosyntactically and semantically. Since an unaccented pronoun is not very complex, right-dislocated pronouns are expected to be used in cases of minor discontinuities. Right-dislocated accented pronouns and full nominal phrases, on the other hand, are semantically and phonologically more complex and thus expected to be used in cases of more serious discontinuities, possibly in reference to brand new discourse referents. These predictions are in accordance with the fact that lexical right-dislocations are often used for reference clarification due to a distant antecedent, whereas this is extremely rare for right-dislocated pronouns.
If a constituent in the right-dislocation position merely signals less degree of predictability and continuity than expected for the corresponding canonical structure, there is in principle nothing that prevents a right-dislocated constituent from being non-topical, as in the case of a right-dislocated pronoun being modified by a focus adverb (see (9)). Due to its form and content, a right-dislocated phrase consisting of a pronoun and a modifying focus adverb will be positioned towards the lower end of a scale of markedness (see (26)). On Givón’s givenness account of topicality, it follows from this that the phrase is extremely unlikely to be the sentence topic. On the aboutness approach to topicality, the exact information status of such a construction has to be accounted for in other ways. However, also on this account, Givón’s notion of markedness adds an explanatory aspect to the otherwise merely stipulated correlation between forms and information structure values: The correlation between a form and an information status is not random but connected to the form’s degree of markedness. Although Givón’s model of markedness in combination with an aboutness definition of topicality does not
Since Givón (
(27) | Nei, jeg la mig ikke i det hele tatt. Jeg blev sittende på sengekanten og tenke. Jeg veit ikke hvor lenge jeg hadde sittet der, |
‘No, I didn’t go to bed at all. I just sat on my bed, thinking. I don’t know how long I had been sitting there, |
In this discourse fragment, one and the same referent is the subject of three subsequent sentences, which
It is possible to account for the connection between pronominal right-dislocation and eventive breaks with reference to information structure. Most of the sentence predicates in our data set (cf.
As pointed out by Mittwoch (
This can be connected to the assumption that pronominal right-dislocation is a topic construction. Given that an event interpretation that answers the question
We now have an explanation for Givón’s observation that markers of low degree of predictability are not only used with referential discontinuity, but also eventive discontinuity. In examples such as (15B1) and (27), the same referent is referred to in subject position in two adjacent sentences, the second time with an accompanying right-dislocated pronoun. Our explanation for why pronominal right-dislocation is often used in such cases, is that the first sentence – despite the subject pronoun – has an eventive variable as its sentence topic (answering the question
Contrastiveness is not a central aspect of Givón’s (
(28) | a. | She had no problem talking to her. |
B. | She had no problem talking to her. |
Intuitively, a contrastive interpretation comes easier to mind for (28b) than for (28a). A natural context for (28b) is a situation with more than one activated female discourse referent, where the predication that holds for the subject referent does not hold for some competing referent candidate. The tendency for accented pronouns to license contrastive interpretations has also been observed in the literature (see e.g.
A similar pattern holds for fronted objects. Being structurally more complex, (29b) is more marked than (29a), according to Givón (
(29) | a. | I spoke to Ann on Skype. |
b. | Ann I spoke to on Skype. |
As described in e.g. Ward & Birner (
Also left-dislocation is particularly natural in situations where the given discourse referent is being contrasted to other accessible discourse referents. (30) illustrates this.
(30) | a. | Peter never showed up. |
b. | Peter, he never showed up. |
Observations in the literature point in the same direction (see e.g.
Based on data such as (28)–(30) and the related literature, we conclude that other things being equal, marked constructions make contrastive interpretations more highly accessible than the corresponding unmarked ones.
There are at least two ways in which this follows from Givón’s (
In terms of the
(31) | a. | |
‘Øystein, he can only play roles as himself’ | ||
b. | ||
‘Øystein can only play roles as himself, |
In (31a), the markedness of the structure is evident already after the second constituent has been processed. Given that the addressee starts searching for a contrastive interpretation at this point, a likely option is to look for alternative referents against which Øystein can be contrasted. In (31b), on the other hand, the markedness of the structure is not evident until the whole utterance has been processed. In such cases, the addressee can use the content of the sentence (as well as pragmatically enriched versions of it) as a basis for identifying potentially contrasting entities. This means that the contrasting entity may be a proposition and it means that the contrasting proposition need not be contextually accessible prior to the utterance, as in (16) and (17); it may be derived through pragmatic inferencing based on the utterance content and whatever contextual clues are otherwise available, as in (18).
Since the two types of dislocation in (31a) and (31b) represent different degrees of markedness, and give access to different types of contrast, this explains why they are sometimes combined and mark the sentence topic twice, as in (8). The constructions are compatible as long as they pick out the same sentence topic. To add a left-dislocated phrase to a sentence with a right-dislocated pronoun may be relevant due to its descriptive content, that enables reference identification, and to add a right-dislocated pronoun to a sentence with a left-dislocated phrase may be desirable due to the specific type of propositional contrast that the construction gives rise to.
We define the type of contrast involved in pronominal right-dislocation as in (32), which is a revised version of Borthen’s (
(32) | The type of contrast involved in pronominal right-dislocation: |
There is contrast between two propositions |
To illustrate this, in (16), based on the topic-comment structure of the sentence with the right-dislocated pronoun, the proposition “[I]TOPIC1 [think it is ok (to be separated)]COMMENT1” can be compared to “[Some people]TOPIC2 [do not think it is ok to be separated]COMMENT2”, where
Summing up so far, we assume with Givón (
We are now in the position to explain why the right-dislocated pronoun in (12) affects reference assignment. Recall the data: Whereas the subject pronoun in (11)
Borthen (
According to relevance theory, the overall comprehension process involves three basic subtasks: a) constructing an appropriate hypothesis about explicit content (the utterance’s explicatures), b) constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual assumptions (implicated premises), and c) constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual implications (implicated conclusions) (
On the relevance-theoretic account of the pragmatic effects of pronominal right-dislocation that we propose, the so-called “emphasis” and “mitigation” effects are implicatures. More precisely, the contrasting proposition
The relevance-theoretic framework accounts for the fact that communication can be either
A sentence with pronominal right-dislocation underdetermines several meaning aspects, including i) whether the speaker intends a contrastive interpretation or not (the marked construction may also be used for the purpose of signaling topic shift only), ii) which propositions ought to be contrasted, and iii) which implicatures to derive from the contrasting proposition in combination with the utterance content and other contextual assumptions. Thus, one might wonder how the addressee is able to land on an interpretation at all. The relevance-theoretic explanation for this rests ultimately on
Concerning the interpretational effects, the relevance-theoretic prediction is that the addressee will look for interpretations that yield the most cognitive effects for the least processing effort. Moreover, he or she will take into consideration the most accessible (least processing demanding) contextual assumptions first and stop the interpretation process as soon as enough cognitive effects are derived. Less accessible contextual assumptions may be accessed and more costly cognitive effects derived if that is needed to achieve the expected level of relevance.
We can now explain the interpretational effects that have been observed for pronominal right-dislocation, e.g. the fact that the speaker seems more emotionally hurt in (3) when a right-dislocated pronoun is present. The right-dislocation makes the utterance marked, which heightens the accessability of a contrastive interpretation. In (3), the explicature ‘Torkild does not count’, does contribute relevant information in and of itself, but much more so if interpreted in light of the contrasting proposition ‘Other people count’ and various assumptions about Torkild, such as Torkild being a special and vulnerable boy. From these and other contextual assumptions, the conclusion ‘The speaker is upset that Torkild is treated worse than other people’ may be derived, which provides extra cognitive effects to compensate for the extra effort imposed by the processing of the right-dislocated pronoun. The addressee might have landed on the same interpretation also without the right-dislocated pronoun, but with the pronoun, the addressee gets a hint to look for some extra cognitive effects, and the specific interpretation gets a kick-start due to the heightened accessibility of a contrastive interpretation.
(33) below is an example which illustrates the potential strengthening (“emphasis”) effect of pronominal right-dislocation. In the situation in which (33) occurs, the speaker is having a row with a young man. The speaker shouts to a woman named Marie before he turns to the young man and continues his speech.
(33) | – Marie, brølte han plutselig. – Marie, kom med selters. Så fortsatte han snerrende: – Du tror du er noe, |
‘– Marie, he suddenly shouted. – Marie, bring the selters. Then he continued, sneering: – You think you are someone, |
The presence of the right-dislocated pronoun has two main effects here. First, it makes the utterance appear as more coherent than it would have without the right-dislocated pronoun, and secondly, it makes the speaker appear as particularly scornful, disrespectful and provoking. Both these effects can be explained on the present account. Being a marked topic construction, the pronoun signals lower degree of continuity and predictability than expected for a pronominal subject. In other words, the pronoun compensates for the shift of sentence topic in the transition to the target sentence in (33). As for the extra emotional strength of the utterance, this can be attributed to the heightened accessibility of a contrastive interpretation. The explicature of the target utterance in (33) is ‘You [= the addressee] think you are someone good’. In the given context, with a high level of conflict, a particularly relevant interpretation is achieved if the utterance is interpreted in light of the contrasting proposition ‘Other people do not think you are someone good’. This contrast between other people’s negative view on the addressee and the addressee’s positive view on himself is likely to give rise to various (weak or strong) implicatures that are all negative evaluations of the addressee and his high self esteem – which explains why the utterance appears as particularly scornful, disrespectful and provoking with the right-dislocated pronoun.
This is a case where pronominal right-dislocation has the effect of
Next, consider (34) from Borthen (
(34) | – Myggen biter i alle fall … Håper fisken gjør det samme. Blir’u med en tur, Kalle. |
– Trur jeg mediterer litt, |
|
‘– The mosquitos are biting, at least … I hope the fish will bite as well. Will you join me, Kalle? | |
– I think I’ll rather meditate for a while, |
In this case, the presence of the right-dislocated pronoun makes the utterance milder and less confronting than what would have been the case without it. However, also this effect is compatible with the proposed analysis of the construction. Being a marked topic construction, the pronoun indicates a lower degree of continuity and predictability than otherwise expected, and thus makes a contrastive interpretation more highly accessible. In this situation, there is a highly accessible contrastive relation evoked by the situation, namely between the addressee’s desire for Kalle to go fishing and Kalle’s desire to meditate and thus not go fishing. The reason why the contrastive aspect makes the utterance appear as milder in this case, is partly due to the utterance content and partly to the more general context. From the prior discourse it seems likely that the interlocutors are friends and want to stay friends. Thus, contextual assumptions and cognitive effects that support such a hypothesis will be particularly easily available. Furthermore, although the speaker expresses that he wants to meditate, he does so in a rather weak way. The Norwegian verb
What is common to (34) and similar examples, such as (16), is that there are some aspects of the utterance or the context that makes it likely that the speaker does not want to make an epistemically strong statement. Either the utterance represents the speaker’s personal view, which may be contested, or the utterance contains some expressions of uncertainly. In (34), the subject and the main verb are
In this paper, we addressed the phenomenon of pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian and presented an account that ties together the construction’s central properties. These properties include the construction’s status as a topic construction as well as various discourse properties, such as its (rare) ability to affect reference assignment, its tendency to be used in cases with minor discourse breaks, its association with contrastiveness, and the fact that it may cause interpretational effects such as “emphasis” and “mitigation”. Although these properties have been extensively discussed in the literature, no satisfactory account that brings them together has existed up to date.
Three previous accounts have been critically examined. Fretheim’s (
According to Givón (
By assuming that marked constructions in general heighten the accessibility of contrastive interpretations, we have also been enabled to explain the construction’s pragmatic effects. The explanation goes as follows: Just like colours look different depending on the colours that surround them, the way we view facts is affected by their “surrounding” contextual assumptions. What might appear as a trivial opinion in some circumstances may seem highly noticeable and “emphasized” when it is viewed in opposition to other people’s opinion. Or conversely, if the speaker expresses that he or she is uncertain about some assumption, then directing the addressee’s attention towards the existence of opposite views may make the utterance’s epistemic status weaker and more open to the addressee’s objections, and thus “mitigated”. This way, the contrasting proposition that a right-dislocated pronoun may give rise to will affect what implicatures to derive from the utterance. Such inferences include (but are not in principle restricted to) a strengthening of the speaker’s epistemic or emotional attitude towards the proposition (i.e. “emphasis”) or a weakening of the speaker’s epistemic stance towards the proposition (i.e. “mitigation”). On this account, “emphasis” and “mitigation” are only approximate umbrella terms for an in principle unlimited set of possible implicatures; unlimited in the sense that the set cannot be exhaustively listed, but restricted in the sense that it is the result of interpreting the utterance content in the light of a specific type of contrasting contextual assumptions. This explains the otherwise puzzling fact that one and the same construction can result in two diametrically opposite effects.
Many questions, including the grammatical properties of the construction, are left for further research. We have not explicated the details of how the information status of a right-dislocated pronoun changes if modified by a focus adverb; only that this is reasonable since the construction then becomes more marked. We have also refrained from presenting any numbers on how frequent the two main functions (topic discontinuity and contrastiveness) are, and to what extent they co-occur; this must be followed up in later studies. Moreover, although we have presented a model for how pronominal right-dislocation is connected to other types of right-dislocation (the prediction being that the more marked the form, the less degree of predictability and continuity), there is a need for corpus studies that systematically compare the discourse properties and pragmatic effects of various types of right-dislocation.
Since we have focused only on Norwegian data, a second natural follow-up study is to investigate to what extent the observed interpretations for Norwegian pronominal right-dislocation recur cross-linguistically. Judging from the descriptions in e.g. Ashby (1988) and Snell (
The additional files for this article can be found as follows:
289 Norwegian text excerpts with sentences with right-dislocated pronouns. DOI:
207 minimal pairs of text fragments with and without pronominal right-dislocation, annotated for subsequent mention of target referent. DOI:
We do not gloss Norwegian text excerpts unless there are specific reasons to. The effects of the right-dislocated pronouns cannot always be captured in a short paraphrase, as they may for instance affect coherence or lead to several weak implicatures. Therefore, the English translations contain a right-dislocated pronoun formatted in small caps in the position of the Norwegian right-dislocated pronoun.
Pronominal right-dislocation occurs mainly in oral speech. Consequently, the data that are presented in this paper are either from quotations in newspapers or magazines (i.e. from interviews), or from dialogues in novels. The Oslo Corpus was chosen as the empirical source for the investigation of pronominal right-dislocation due to its rich annotation and advanced search system, which makes it possible to delimit searches to the target phenomenon.
The pronoun in (9) necessarily achieves word accent.
Karagjosova (
The huge difference in frequency between subject correlates and fronted object correlates is probably due to subjects being far more frequent than fronted objects in general in Norwegian. Due to the low number of fronted objects, we have chosen not to propose any generalization concerning their form.
The pronominal subject in (12) is most naturally accented whereas the pronoun in (11) is most naturally unaccented.
Gundel et al.’s (
In (26) we have contrasted minimal pairs with pronominal subject correlates, but similar scales can be derived for all types of correlates, for instance fronted objects. Deriving specific scales is, however, not a goal in itself. The crucial point is the generalization, which says that when two linguistic forms constitute a minimal pair, the one that is more marked will be associated with less degree of continuity and predictability.
We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.
The authors have no competing interests to declare.