To resume or not to resume: Some remarks on 'resumption' in left dislocation constructions in Polish, and its relevance for Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

Part of a 2015 Stellenbosch workshop on left dislocation (LD) in Biblical Hebrew, where one camp holds that LD needs a resumptive pronoun (otherwise it is "extreme topicalisation") and the other treats resumption as a prototype feature that may be missing. The author tests this on Polish, from native-speaker judgements and from three Polish Bible translations of twelve classic Hebrew LD verses (36 renderings). In Polish, resumption is often left out, especially when the dislocate is the matrix subject or already carries the case the matrix clause needs; only a non-subject role with a casus-pendens dislocate requires it. Of the 36 renderings, 22 drop the resumptive and look almost like fronting, set apart only by the pause (a comma). Conclusion: LD is a radial, gradient category that shades into fronting, and resumption is optional cross-linguistically, so its absence in Hebrew does not by itself rule out LD.

Ideas

• I1. Detect LD in our trees as a gradient, not a yes/no: a clause-initial NP (or relative clause headed by אֲשֶׁר/מִי) followed by a matrix clause; score features separately — resumptive pronoun or suffix agreeing in person/gender/number, a disjunctive accent after the dislocate, a וְ before the matrix clause, the dislocate's role. Count how many Torah candidates have each feature.
• I2. The role of the dislocate predicts resumption: test on the Torah whether non-subject dislocates (object, prepositional) are resumed more often than subject ones, as in Polish.
• I3. The relative-clause dislocate resumed by a demonstrative or pronoun ("whoever …, he shall die", Gen 44:9; Exod 9:21) is a frequent LD type: write it as its own rule.

For Mova

I1 and I3 go into Syntax: the clause and the sentence (dislocation) and as UD dislocated assignment in tools/macula (head rules), with the accent feature from 02-cantillation.md. I2 is a count to report in chapter 8. The paper's Polish data itself gives nothing for Mova; its use is the method of treating LD as scored features.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5842/50-0-722

@inproceedings{andrason2016resume,
  title = {{To resume or not to resume: Some remarks on 'resumption' in left dislocation constructions in Polish, and its relevance for Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Andrason, Alexander},
  booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.5842/50-0-722},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5842/50-0-722}
}

References

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