Dislocation as a Strategy of Thematisation in Arabic

Abstract

The contemporary Arabic studies rarely include corpus-based works discussing at various levels of sentence description the mechanisms of thematisation, i.e. moving of constituents to initial position from their unmarked post-verbal and post-subject positions. This paper examines a specific thematisation strategy, namely dislocation and aims to discuss the properties of the Arabic topic-comment structure. The paper gives an insight into syntactic and semantic features of topic-comment structure constituents and communicative role of the topic that is an external sentence element. The analysis focuses on frequently discussed subject thematisation and it is argued that the SGO structure is the topic-comment structure, i.e. it falls under the rule of dislocation, not focusing. The dislocated constituent will leave a trace at the original site, not by usage of resumptive pronoun clitic form, but in form of verb agreement fully specified for number, person and gender affixes instead. Also, a fundamental distinction is drawn between structural and semantic field of resumptive topic i. e. right-dislocation and permutative.