Initiala annex i en teckenbaserad konstruktionsgrammatik

Abstract

Left-dislocations (Sw. initial dislokation ’initial dislocation’, ID) and hanging scenes (Sw. fritt initial annex som motsvarar ett fritt adverbial i den inre satsen ’free initial annex corresponding to a free adverbial in the main clause’, FIA) are both structures with a phrase preceding the main clause. While ID also has a pronominal copy, referring to that phrase, inside the main clause, no such copy is found in the main clause following FIA. This report investigates ID and FIA in a Construction Grammar framework, describing ID and FIA as constructions consisting of a form paired with an information structural meaning. An analysis of 295 instances of ID and FIA, most of them collected from spoken language, shows that ID can be construed in many ways, but that half of the instances of ID can be divided into three different construction patterns, where the following aspects are the same: the syntactic form of the ID and the pronominal copy, the syntactic function of the pronominal copy, the position of the pronominal copy, and the type of clause in which the pronominal copy occurs. In terms of information structure, the most interesting result is that ID does not only have the information structural status topic, but also scene, vocative topic and, at times, focus. The instances of FIA all have the information structural status scene, and these are used in any syntactic form instantiating that scene. Furthermore, ID and FIA are in this report formalized as constructions in the framework of Sign-based Construction Grammar, which is introduced in and applied to Swedish for the first time. The constructions are also formulated as entries in the construction database Swedish Constructicon. Finally, this report presents a preliminary sketch of how ID and FIA can be included in a constructicon network of Swedish, i.e. the mental network our grammars consist of. The proposed network introduces another categorization of ID and FIA than the one being used in the Swedish reference grammar, but the categories of the reference grammar could also be incorporated in this draft.