3 - Non-canonical Beginnings

Summary

Chapter 3 of Discourse Syntax (Non-Canonical Beginnings) introduces students to sentences with non-canonical beginnings, which we define as the non-canonical placement of a core element of the clause to the left of the subject. Students learn to differentiate between topicalization, left-dislocation, and sentence-initial adjuncts, as well as different types of inversion, including locative inversion, and are introduced to how these syntactic patterns are used to structure the discourse – establishing topics, packaging information, providing signposts – and under which discourse conditions they occur. Woven into these explanations are data from current research in the text-linguistic and variationist approach and attestations from freely available corpora.