La dislocazione a sinistra con funzione fraseologica e pragmatica nel Narrenschiff di Sebastian Brant

Abstract

Left dislocation and hanging topic are sentence structures frequently occurring in contemporary German spoken language. Both consist in moving a costituent to the left sentence periphery in order to focus it, and in placing after it a resumptive element: it is usually a d-pronoun in the left dislocation, and any pronoun or an anaphoric noun phrase in the hanging topic. These sentence patterns can be found in German medieval texts as well, where they seem to be already stable, although they can hardly be distinguished from one another because of the lacking of prosodic information. They can be classified as a phraseological formula because they are capable of highlighting a constituent in a fixed word order. They can thus be evaluated for their pragmatic function in texts where the author wants to establish a proximity to his public by using a colloquial emphatic expression. This paper intends to examine these two kinds of left dislocation in Brant’s Narrenschiff, one major work of late medieval German literature, which is has not been the object of syntactic studies. The essay shows hints how Brant used these phraseological patterns with both awareness and regularity.