Left Detachment in a verb-final language: the interactional perspective

The study examines Left Detached (LD) structures (Left Dislocation and Hanging Topics) in a corpus of natural interaction in Anal Naga (Trans-Himalayan, India; ISO 639-3:anm) in the multimodal interactional framework. Instead of following the pre-empirical assumption that LD-structures form a syntactic construction, the study demonstrates that they are instantiations of a broader phenomenon of “detached NPs”. These are NPs which initiate a new syntactic structure and terminate the Intonation Unit. The study argues that such NPs constitute a separate move in interaction which achieves local goals while the continuation is not yet planned, as is evidenced by prosody, gaze, and co-gesture. There are two frequent scenarios where detached NPs occur: (i) turn-taking, where the detached constituent serves as the locus of securing the floor or for a search of a new recipient, and (2) local moves that align the joint attention at a new referent or maintain the attention at an active referent. LD-structures do not form a separate group within these examples with respect to their function, usage, and frequency. As such, they are occasional compositional collocations of a detached NP and a clause. The apparent topical effects associated with LD-structures require no concept of topicality but are vague interpretive effects epiphenomenal of the general factors of attention and relevance and observed only in static retrospective examination. They are unneeded for the analysis and irrelevant for the dynamic planning and processing of interactional discourse.