dislocations and other peripheral elements in child language

[Dan I. SLOBIN]

Right dislocations are common in Turkish, which is an SOV language.
Continuing information (given, topic, etc.) appears post-verbally; the
immediate pre-verbal slot is for focus.  These word-order patterns are
used in pragmatically appropriate fashion from the beginning of multiword
utterances in Turkish.  There are a number of papers on this issue in
Turkish child language, as well as sections of several doctoral
dissertations.

-Dan Slobin
Psych, Univ of Calif, Berkeley

On Mon, 17 May 1999, Cecile De Cat wrote:

> Dear InfoChildes
>
> I am writing to ask if anyone knows of studies of dislocations and other peripheral elements in child language.  By this, I mean any type of selected or unselected argument that appears outside of the "core of the sentence", typically with a dislocation intonation.  The two examples below are from adult French.  The peripheral elements are capitalised (capitals not being used here to indicate focus).
>
> (1)     	elle est folle, CETTE FILLE
> 	she is   mad, this     girl
> (2) 	MOI, LES HISTOIRES, j'aime bien
> 	me    the stories         I like   well
>
> A while back, there was a message from Lawrence Cheung on the Linguist List, inquiring about languages with right-dislocations.  This is, in part, what I am interested in, but in the field of child language, and in both directions (left and right).
>
> Thanks a lot for your help
>
>
> Cecile De Cat
> University of York
>
>