Where Does the Sentence Margin Begin?

A Syntactic Study of Dislocation in Spanish

Abstract

In the field of information structure, the term dislocation (dislocación) designates a syntactic thematization or topicalization mechanism that alters the basic word order by placing a constituent at the beginning or the end of the sentence to convert it into theme or topic (DLE, s. v. dislocación; Villalba 2019: 48). From the point of view of information structure, the most discussed aspect of this reordering is the characterization of the informative function it performs, but the dislocation has also given rise to discussions about its impact on the syntax of the sentence. One of the main dilemmas concerns the relationship of the dislocated element to the sentence nucleus: after it undergoes the syntactic operation of dislocation, does it remain grammatically dependent on the pre­dicate nucleus, or does it move to the sentence margin breaking its direct dependence?

In the present article, we aim to investigate how the organisation of information affects the sentence’s syntactic structure, especially what impact the dislocation has on grammatical dependence and the assignment of syntactic functions. The main goal is to tackle the different approaches to syntactic analysis of dislocation to try to discern how its influence on sentence syntax can be described. The article therefore discusses the criteria that define the sentence periphery as well as the elements that mark the syntactic segmentation of the utterance, and assesses the arguments for and against the main analyses proposed and further considers whether we can distinguish between two variants of dislocation, one that limits itself to the sentence nucleus and another that moves the constituent to a peripheral position. This way, we hope to contribute to theoretical debate on the limits of the sentence margin and the scope of the predicate, and in turn to improve our understanding of the nature of dislocation and dislocated constituents in Spanish.