Variants like negative concord may be highly stigmatised because they have obvious standard alternatives in writing. But what about syntactic features that only ever occur in spoken discourse? One example of a variant that meets this criteria is right dislocation: this refers to the occurrence of a clause followed by a noun phrase or pronoun tag which is co-referential with the preceding subject or object pronoun; for instance, ’She’s lovely, her mum’ or ’I’ve not got an accent, me’. The Midlan High data shows that, unlike negative concord, right dislocation is used by all communities of practice, but there are differences in its frequency of use and, particularly, in the precise formulations of right dislocation used by different communities of practice. These differences reflect how speakers make social moves by exploiting the links between precise syntactic configuration and possible meanings. Significantly, this chapter suggests that the frequency with which certain social groups use particular syntactic constructions is a direct consequence of the need or willingness to express the pragmatic meaning the construction encodes.

Chapter 3 presents an overview of issues in Korean syntax. The specific chapters on syntax address topics that have received attention in both traditional and contemporary investigations of Korean (morpho) syntax, such as anaphora (Han) and nominalizations (Yoon), as well as some that have not previously been investigated in depth, such as Sino-Korean person-denoting nominals (Kim and Sells). The chapter on Right Dislocation (Ko) deals with a construction that received relatively little discussion in traditional or early generative analyses but has emerged as a central testing ground for contemporary debates on movement, ellipsis, and related issues. Finally, Kwon’s contribution deals with real-time processing of syntactic dependencies, which traditionally falls within the field of psycholinguistics. While the papers by Ko, Han, and Kwon are surveys, those by Kim and Sells, and Yoon are not, although the latter tries to situate the proposed analysis against the backdrop of longstanding debates in the analysis of lexical nominalizations in generative grammar. Overall, the collection of papers strikes a balance between familiar topics and newer, lesser-known, topics.

Chapter 12 analyzes the phenomenon whereby various types of elements may appear in postverbal position in Korean: arguments such as the subject, the object, the indirect object, and clausal complements may be dislocated to the right. Moreover, a variety of non-argument projections such as adverbials, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and small clause predicates may also appear in a postverbal position. The chapter focuses on two basic issues on RDCs: (i) whether the RDC involves a mono-clausal or bi-clausal structure and (ii) whether postverbal elements undergo movement or are base-generated. The chapter also looks into differences among sub-varieties of RDCs in Korean, as classified by the grammatical and semantic function of the Right-Dislocated material, the type of the correlate in the main clause, and the number of dislocated items. Cross-linguistic implications of the Korean data for the current research on RDCs in other languages such as English, Dutch, German, and Bangla are also discussed.