Pragmatic Study Of Left Dislocation In Oral English

Left Dislocation is a syntactic structure resulting from moving a component of a sentence to the left and in the original position of the sentence just leaving a copy. Left Dislocation was first proposed by Ross, and was expanded by Bussmann who called it prolepsis method or fronting method. Left Dislocation is an effective mode of expression and plays an important role in oral English.So far, many insightful investigations have been made into Left Dislocation, but most of these studies focus on information structure of Left Dislocation, neglecting pragmatic motivations behind the application of such construction. This thesis makes a pragmatic analysis of Left Dislocation in oral English in terms of Sperber&Wilson’s Relevance Theory and Grice’s Cooperative Principle. On one hand, the selection of this structure is related to procedural encoding and construction of shared cognitive environment of Relevance Theory. On the other hand, the structure is also related to the Cooperative Principle. Meanwhile, this thesis analyzes the pragmatic functions of Left Dislocation in oral English.This thesis makes a comprehensive analysis of Left Dislocation in oral English from pragmatic aspect in order to realize the forming causes of the structure and its functional characteristics; it also offers both theoretical and practical implications.