Introduction In a conversation, speakers employ different conversational strategies to achieve different purposes. For instance, often times a purposefully made change in the syntactic structure can give certain explicit or sometimes subtle messages to the hearers. For instance, instead of saying directly “Please pass me the salt,” we might say “Could you pass me the […]

Cheung (1998) identified that Right Dislocation in Cantonese and that in European languages like Italian and English are vastly different. Despite the differences he pointed out, he did not proceed to conclude that what he regarded as the most common type of RD in Cantonese, namely Gap Right Dislocation, is an independent phenomenon. It should be separated with what we commonly refer to as RD, and be analyzed on its own right.

On the other hand, while Cheung regarded Pronominal Right Dislocation to be an equivalent of RD in European languages, I will show that although the two kinds of RD belong to the same phenomenon, Cantonese RD actually has its own specific behaviors, and is not an exact copy of RD in European languages. I will especially compare RD in Italian with that in Cantonese, because of their being pro-drop languages and because Italian RD is more extensively studied.