left dislocation

left dislocation (venstre-dislokering): a sentence construction whereby a referent is mentioned twice; first by means of a full noun phrase at the beginning of the sentence  (i.e. to the left of the body of the sentence), and then by means of a pronoun within the body of the sentence. E.g. Those kids, they are driving me crazy.  Left dislocation is typical of spoken English, and is used when the speaker wants to draw extra attention to the referent of the noun phrase, for example because it represents a new topic in the conversation. Compare right dislocation.