Left dislocations across discourse types in monolinguals and bilinguals’ English

Left dislocation (LD) is described as a feature of informal, spoken discourse. However, most research on LD relies on a collection of examples or on datasets with a restricted mode/formality. To understand LD use across discourse types, we investigate the frequency of LDs in a corpus of 287 participants with four narrative types: informal spoken, formal spoken, informal written, formal written. We consider the speaker characteristics of age (adolescent and adult), gender (female and male), and speaker group (English monolinguals and German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish heritage speakers). We also analyze LD characteristics (e.g., noun phrase, function) based on formality. We found that the spoken mode contained more LDs than the written one and that informal narratives had more LDs than formal ones. However, the effect of formality was modulated by speaker group: only Turkish heritage speakers produced more LDs in the informal than formal narratives, while the other groups showed no evidence of a formality effect. No evidence of age or gender effects was discovered. Lastly, participants used LDs of the same characteristics in both formalities. Thus, the study confirms previous findings on LD use across discourse types and raises the importance of including bilingualism as a speaker characteristic.