Dislocation in French
Informal spoken French uses right dislocation very naturally and extensively, to detach semantic information from the grammatical information. Whereas a French news article would likely translate The dog bit the little girl as Le chien a mordu la petite fille (lit. "The dog has bitten the little girl"), in everyday speech one might hear Il l'a mordue, le chien, la petite fille (lit. "It her has bitten, the dog, the little girl"), in which both le chien ("the dog") and la petite fille ("the little girl") have been dislocated to the right and replaced by pronouns within the clause. This phenomenon was first studied in French by linguist Joseph Vendryes.
It has been proposed that informal spoken French can be analyzed as having polypersonal agreement; that is, the various (mostly clitic) pronouns surrounding the verb can be viewed as inflections on the verb that agree in person, number, and sometimes gender with its various arguments.
Author Raymond Queneau, whose favourite example of dislocation in French was Il l'a-t-il jamais attrapé, le gendarme, son voleur ? ("Has he ever caught him, the policeman, his thief?"), has been inspired to write many articles such as Connaissez-vous le Chinook ? ("Do you know Chinookan?"). According to Queneau, right dislocation in Chinookan is commonplace.
Read more about this topic: Dislocation (syntax)
Famous quotes containing the words dislocation and/or french:
“For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,—re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Have ye got the parcel there for Mrs White?
Ye haven’t! Oh, begorra!
Say it’s comin’ down tomorra—
And it might now, Michael, so it might!’”
—William Percy French (1854–1920)