grammar - Pronoun immediately following its antecedent


Is placing a pronoun immediately after its antecedent in a sentence valid grammar?


Is there a term for this construction?


Some examples are:



  • President Obama, he gave a speech last night.

  • The speech, it was about the financial system.


I hear this on the Planet Money podcast at least once per episode.



Answer



Huddleston and Pullum (authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’) call it ‘dislocation’, of which they distinguish two types, ‘left dislocation’, where the Noun Phrase is postioned to the left of the clause nucleus, and ‘right dislocation’, which describes the opposite. As an example of left dislocation, they give ‘One of my cousins, she has triplets.’ This construction seems to match exactly the OP’s examples.


Huddleston and Pullum further comment, ‘Dislocated constructions can be easier to understand than their basic counterpart.’


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