Left-detachment

Left-detachment is a detachment construction in which the deatched constitutent occurs at the left periphery of the clause.

Example

French Quant à Wolfgang Wendt, il avait à nouveau disparu, et serait blessé à la jambe. 'As for wolfgang Wendt, he had disappeared again, and is said to have a leg injury.' (Lagae 2007:331)

Reference

• Barnes, Betsy K. 1985. The pragmatics of left detachment in Spoken Standard French. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Lagae, Véronique. 2007. Left-detachment and topic-marking in French. Folia Linguistica 41.3/4:327-355.