Different Types of Left Dislocation in Persian

Abstract

The present study introduces and examines the characteristics of different types of Left Dislocation constructions in Persian language. Left Dislocation (LD) is a construction in which an element instead of being in its original position of sentence is located at the beginning of the clause and a resumptive element takes its canonical place. This study, which is based on the criteria introduced by Cinqué (1990) and Westbury (2016) to identify and determine the types of LD, shows that the Persian language has two types of such construction: Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD) and Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). In order to prove the existence of these two types of LD in Persian language, this research studies the structural differences of these two constructions from two aspects: syntactic connectivity and distributional constraints governing them. This study shows that in Persian there are more distributional constraints on HTDL than CLLD. On the other hand, there is less syntactic connectivity between the initial element and the continuation of the clause in HTLD compared with CLLD

Keywords

• left dislocation
• resumptive element
• syntactic connectivity
• distributional constraint
• reconstruction