Right-dislocation as deletion

Abstract

While the left clausal periphery has been in the center of attention of syntactic theory since the 1970s, the right periphery remains comparatively ill-understood. The goal of this paper is to rectify this situation. We argue that Germanic right-dislocation constructions are composed of two juxtaposed clauses, the dislocated peripheral XP being a remnant of ellipsis in the second clause. This analysis explains the extra-sentential status of right-dislocated constituents while simultaneously accounting for signs of syntactic connectivity. These two seemingly conflicting facets are reconciled in a manner familiar from deletion-based accounts of sluicing and fragment answers, i.e. by attributing the relevant (apparent) grammatical interactions to parallel but silent clausal structure. We show that this analysis successfully derives the core properties of both backgrounded and focused (‘afterthought’) phrases at the right periphery, whereas monosentential movement or base-generation accounts necessarily fall short of accounting for the observed facts. The analysis not only eliminates a putative case of rightward movement, but shows that right-dislocation can be fully understood in terms of independently motivated computations, thereby removing constructional residue from the theory of Universal Grammar.