Grammatical snippet of the day: there's a construction called "left dislocation," which was quite common in Old English. Example:
"My couch, it's covered with copies of Dante."
The gist seems to be you state the topic of your sentence as a grammatically separate element, and then you get into the sentence proper with a pronoun. It's somewhat redundant--if you wanted to be more efficient, you could probably leave the pronoun out altogether. People still use this construction, especially when talking. Left dislocation is not an appositive, a descriptive phrase set "apposite" to the noun, because appositives come afterward to add information or clarify the reference. Left dislocation, it starts with a clear reference and adds the pronoun later.
Left dislocation is said to be more common in "topic-prominent" languages, another phrase I'd never heard before. Topic-prominent languages apparently don't think in terms of subjects and objects, exactly, as in terms of "what this sentence is mostly about" and "what other nouns are necessary to help me talk about it."
Cool, no? Hat tip: the Wordhoard.
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4 comments:
The point, it is cool, yes. And I hear this sometimes in Italian, too--
"A size 37, do you have it?"
Languages, they are fun; yes?
They are, yes! :-)
This construction, it is really common here in Kenya... "Even me, I am having a car." The present continuing tense makes it all the more fun, as does the use of "even me" in stead of "me too." =)
Sweet! I had no idea. :-)
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