Dislocations and framings

This chapter provides a formal and pragmatic characterization of dislocation and framing, based on a comparative analysis of Romance languages. Given their shared quality as non-operator A΄-dependencies, dislocated constituents and framesetters are both treated as instances of topicalization and distinguished in terms of “sentence topics” and “limiting topics”, respectively. A typology of topics is then proposed, showing the correlation between discourse functions, prosodic properties and dedicated positions in the C-domain. In particular, sentence and limiting topics are illustrated and confronted for their intonational contours, morpho-syntactic properties (such as reconstruction, minimality and WCO effects), derivation, position in the functional array and role in the conversational dynamics. Attention is also paid to clitic resumption and a comparison with another type of dislocation, namely marginalization, is proposed. Based on naturalistic data and interpretive judgments, evidence is provided that framing must be kept distinct from dislocation and forms an independent discourse category.