Right-dislocation as deletion

While the left clausal periphery has been in the center of attention of syntactic theory since the 1970s, the right periphery remains comparatively ill-understood. The goal of this paper is to rectify this situation. We argue that Germanic right-dislocation constructions are biclausal structures, the dislocated peripheral XP being a remnant of ellipsis in the second clause. This analysis accounts for the otherwise paradoxical status of the dislocated XP, which on the one hand is structurally external to its host clause, but exhibits signs of connectivity into it on the other. The ellipsis analysis resolves this paradox in a manner analogous to deletion-based accounts of sluicing and fragment answers, i.e. by attributing the grammatical interactions brought out by connectivity effects to an underlying full clausal structure. We show that this analysis successfully derives the core properties of both backgrounded and focused (‘afterthought’) phrases at the right periphery, whereas monoclausal movement or base-generation accounts necessarily fall short of accounting for the observed facts. The analysis not only eliminates a putative case of rightward movement, but shows that rightdislocation can be fully understood in terms of independently motivated computations, thereby removing constructional residue from the theory of Universal Grammar.