Last but not least: a comparative perspective on right dislocation in Alasha Mongolian
Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee
September 2023 

The primary goal of this paper is to understand the information structure of right dislocation (RD). I report a variation in RD in Asian languages with regard to the information structural status of the right dislocated elements. The discussion focuses on Alasha, a Mongolic language spoken in Mongolia. Through a comparative perspective on right dislocation, I show that RD languages come in two types: one that allows focused elements to be right dislocated, and one that disallows focused elements to be right dislocated. I argue that Alasha belongs to the former type, and I propose a bi-clausal analysis of Alasha RD, where Focus movement may occur in the second clause. Drawing on these findings, I further argue that the variation in RD is due to the parametric difference on the licensing condition of Focus Projection in Asian languages. Ulti- mately, the findings of this paper strengthen a non-uniform approach to RD in natural languages in both syntactic structure and information structure, despite their surface similarities.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006889 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Accepted in Journal of East Asian Linguistics
keywords:	right dislocation, information structure, focus, focus projection, parameters
previous versions:	v3 [September 2023] v2 [August 2023] v1 [October 2022]
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