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Article In: Constructions Disloquées: Descriptions, modélisations, approches contrastives
Edited by Alexander Guryev, Florence Lefeuvre and Nathalie Rossi-Gensane
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 49:1] 2026

Left dislocation in Russian

A pragma-syntactic account

 | Samarkand State Institute of Foreign Languages
 | University of Verona
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This study examines Left Dislocation (LD) in Russian within the Fribourg Pragma-Syntax framework, originally developed for the analysis of French in authentic discourse. Drawing on data from the spoken subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus, we argue that LD constitutes a macro-syntactic routine composed of two syntactically independent yet pragmatically interdependent enunciations. Our analysis suggests that the biclausal structure of LD optimizes the syntactic processing of spoken discourse in two key ways: by simplifying case-marking operations and facilitating coreference resolution.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Theoretical framework and methodology
  • 2.Left dislocation in Russian: Preliminary observations
    • 2.1LD in Russian linguistic literature
    • 2.2Syntactic variation in LD constructions
  • 3.Fribourg Pragma-Syntax: Left Dislocation as a macro-syntactic routine
    • 3.1Towards a description of LD beyond dependency-based syntax
    • 3.2LD as a macro-syntactic routine Preparation + Action
  • 4.Left Dislocation: From biclausal structure to syntactic optimization
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (36)
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