ABSTRACT
This chapter tackles the distribution of sentences containing left-dislocated constituents in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. Once the phenomenon of left dislocation has been properly defined (Section 2), this investigation concentrates on the analysis of the corpus data (see Section 3) in the following directions: (i) statistical evolution of left dislocation in the recent history of the English language (Section 4); (ii) influence of orality and genre on left dislocation (Section 5.1); (iii) information conveyed by the left-dislocated material, that is, the discourse based referentiality potential of the left-dislocated constituents in terms of recoverability, and its association with end-focus (Section 5.2); and (iv) grammatical complexity of the left-dislocated material and its association with end weight (Section 5.3).
