dislocated topic sentences

Bridget   Tue May 22, 2007 12:10 am GMT
Could the native speakers here please post examples of natural sounding, dislocated topic sentences?

EG

"This little shop ... it's lovely."
Travis   Tue May 22, 2007 12:31 am GMT
The matter is that English does have topic-comment-type aspects to it outside of the use of the definite and indefinite articles, particularly that one can move things to the start of a sentence to emphasize them as a topic, be they adjectival or adverbial phrases, prepositional phrases, or even the indirect or direct objects (and what is actually the indirect or direct object can usually be discerned from context). When the indirect or direct object are moved, it is common (but not obligatory) to leave a pronoun such as "it" in its place. It is also not uncommon to encounter sentences where the direct object has been moved to initial position, aside form just wh-movement, without anything marking its original position. Note that in some of these cases there may be residual V2-type verb movement, like in other non-Anglic Germanic languages, even though in most cases this is not present in Late New English.
Guest   Tue May 22, 2007 2:23 am GMT
OSV sentences are very common in Spoken English where I live.