"Ho sabíeu, això?" La dislocació a la dreta en català

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to describe right-dislocation in Catalan from a quantitative and qualitative corpus. Right-dislocation is the non-canonical construction in which a pronoun in the main clause is coreferential with a final noun phrase. Although right-dislocation is very frequent in Catalan, especially in oral language, it has been little studied.                                                         The corpus consists of 93 right-dislocations, coded according to three parameters. The main focus of analysis is the type of information found in right-dislocation and the motivations for this construction. The analysis compares right-dislocation with other rhetorical alternatives that the speaker might have used to convey the same information: a sentence with a pronoun and without a displaced constituent or a sentence with a canonical order.                                                             I argue that right-dislocation in Catalan is a means to structure information and to create the necessary pragmatic and semantic effects needed in the context.

Keywords: Catalan, pragmatics, right dislocation, information packaging, information structure.