Left-dislocation revisited

This is a revised and much expanded version of a paper presented for the XVIII AEDEAN Conference (Alcalá de Henares, December 1994)The aim of this paper is to provide syntactic evidence that left-dislocated NPs (LDs) do not belong inside the structure of the sentences with which they are usually associated. It is argued here that the relationship between LDs and these sentences is merely a semantic one of co-reference and that, therefore, no formal, structural liaison exists between them. The analysis that contemplates the left-dislocated constituent as a sister of a lower clausal node inside the highest S node is consequently abandoned in favour of a discourse-oriented interpretation. According to this, left-dislocation is best seen as involving structurally independent co-referential units in discourse