UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 15 (2003)

Right Dislocation in Cantonese as a focus-marking device

ANN LAW

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This paper considers some aspects of Right Dislocation in Cantonese and argues that, despite its name, it is different from Right Dislocation in Romance and Germanic languages, with respect to its linguistic properties, function and structure. Right Dislocation in Cantonese is a device to mark identificational focus. Adopting Cheung’s (1997) leftward-movement analysis, I argue that the focused constituent is moved to the Focus field (Rizzi 1997) rather than adjoined to some projection. This analysis captures the facts about the phenomenon better.

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