Reviewed by Reda A. H. Mahmoud, Minya University, Egypt

Dislocated elements in discourse is a panoramic study of dislocated structures in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian. It is divided into three parts containing sixteen empirical and theoretical articles that provide an array of examples and analyses from syntax, semantics, prosody, and discourse analysis.

The first part is a description of the basic phenomena and structures grouped together as dislocation. The second part explores the content encoded by dislocation structures, such as semantic, pragmatic, and discourse information. The theoretical third part focuses on the distinction between integration and non-integration of dislocates into their host sentences. The organization of the volume reflects the three fundamental questions of the possibility of a general model of syntactic structure that can accommodate dislocation structures, how dislocation relates to a sentence’s information structure and illocutionary force, and the appropriateness of dislocates to fit into a theoretical framework.

In Part 1, Javier Pérez-Guerra and David Tizón-Couto investigate left-dislocated constituents from Middle to Modern English and draw attention to their high productivity in written and formal texts. Gϋnther Grewendorf examines the differences between left-periphery dislocation elements and resumptive pronouns in Italian and Spanish. Nicholas Sobin discusses the correspondence between echo questions and the complementizer phrase (CP), while Frederick J. Newmeyer investigates the category program of Chomsky’s theory of grammatical-semantic correspondence with respect to CP domain to call into question his claim that language has an optimal design. Ruth Kempson, Jieun Kiaer, and Ronnie Cann show how left and right periphery can be explained in similar terms through an examination of syntactic, discourse, and semantic properties of left and right periphery dislocation in Italian, Spanish, and Catalan.

Part 2 treats more abstract forms of dislocation by highlighting the relation of the left periphery to such notions as topic, focus, and force. Nicola Munaro and Cecilia Poletto describe sentential particles like ti and clausal typing in the Venetan dialect, and Malte Zimmermann investigates the German particle wohl. Both studies handle the syntactic and semantic properties of these particles as left-peripheral elements.

Betty J. Birner focuses on three classes of noncanonical constructions that exploit peripheral sentence position to show the role of inferential links among current and prior utterances. Sam Mchombo and Yukiko Morimoto examine discourse and semantic properties of split NPs in Chicheŵa, a Bantu language. Beáta Gyuris outlines a new approach to the narrow scope readings of quantificational contrastive topics in Hungarian, focusing on the intonational, discourse, and semantic properties of topicalization and focalization. Ariel Cohen offers a relative reading that explains how fronted quantificational adverbs change the truth conditions of a sentence.

In the first two papers of Part 3, Liliane Haegeman applies an orphan analysis approach to prove the extrasentential character of parenthetical adverbial clauses. Liliane Hageman, Benjamin Shaer, and Werner Frey explore some empirical challenges to the orphan approach represented by three phenomena in German and other languages: tense subordination, illocutionary subordination, and V2 configuration patterns. Similarly, Benjamin Shaer adopts an orphan analysis to compare N-class hanging-topic left dislocation structures in German and English.

Anikó Lipták examines the left-peripheral distribution of headless relative clauses in Hungarian and investigates their syntactic properties. Finally, Anke Holler explains the grammatical behavior of German wh-relative clauses as being due to their position as a left periphery, claiming that they establish their own non-integrated class of German relative clauses.