A Movement Approach to Contrastive Left Dislocation

Abstract

Studies of left dislocation constructions in a number of languages seem to put a lot of emphasis on the evaluation of the nature of this phenomenon: movement or base-generation. This paper adds to these studies. By comparing two varieties of left dislocation in German, I propose a movement approach for one type of left disloca-tion and a non-movement account for the other, while also laying out the fundamen-tal diagnostics of distinguishing the two types. I further propose spelling out of fea-tures to be a characteristic of the movement type.