🌐 dislocated: dislocated element

Universal Dependencies · 6 key papers · all concepts

Part of: 🗨️ Natural language processing · 🌐 Universal Dependencies

dislocated is the Universal Dependencies relation for a phrase placed before or after a clause, typically set off and echoed by a pronoun inside it. The phrase sits outside the clause's ordinary argument structure, so it is attached to the clause's head as a dislocated element.

Also: dislocated element, left dislocation, right dislocation

What it is

In Universal Dependencies, every word of a sentence hangs from exactly one head under a typed label, and content words serve as heads (Marneffe et al. 2021). The label dislocated covers a phenomenon of syntax and pragmatics. A speaker announces a referent at the edge of a sentence and then says something about it.

Two things make an element dislocated. It stands at the periphery of the clause, either fronted (left dislocation) or postposed (right dislocation, sometimes called an afterthought). It also does not carry the core grammatical function in that clause. That function is usually filled by a resumptive pronoun, which takes the regular label such as nsubj or obj.

The relation runs from the head of the clause to the head of the dislocated phrase. The clause head is usually the main predicate, a verb or a nonverbal predicate. The dependent is the nominal or pronoun that was moved out to the edge.

The label belongs to the fixed set of universal relations that languages may refine but not extend with new basic types (Nivre et al. 2020). It has been present since the first release of the guidelines, which grew out of the universal Stanford dependencies (Nivre et al. 2016; Marneffe et al. 2014).

Neighbouring relations

Annotators most often confuse dislocated with the following labels:

• nsubj / obj: a fronted object with no resumptive pronoun (This book I like.) is plain topicalization. It keeps obj, because it still fills the argument slot. How core arguments are identified across languages is treated separately in the scheme (Zeman 2017).
• vocative: a peripheral nominal that addresses the hearer rather than naming a topic.
• appos: an appositive modifies a noun, whereas a dislocated element depends on the clause.
• parataxis and discourse: loosely attached clauses and interjections that do not name a referent of the clause.

Subtypes

The scheme allows language-specific subtypes written with a colon (Nivre et al. 2020). For dislocated, however, no subtype is in common cross-lingual use, and most treebanks use the bare label.

Examples

Mary, I really like her.
dislocated(like, Mary)   obj(like, her)

The proper noun is the left-dislocated topic. The pronoun her is the true object.

Ce film, je l'ai vu deux fois.
dislocated(vu, film)   obj(vu, l')

This is French left dislocation with a clitic resumptive l'.

They're completely crazy, those guys.
dislocated(crazy, guys)   nsubj(crazy, They)

Here the dislocation is on the right. The head is the adjectival predicate, because in UD the copula depends on the content word (Marneffe et al. 2021).

Across languages

The relation is unevenly used. Spoken and informal registers are its natural home. Languages differ both in how often speakers dislocate and in how treebank teams draw the line between topicalization and dislocation.

In English, the commonest case is a noun attached to a verbal head. French is different, because colloquial French dislocates constantly (Moi, je…, Lui, il…). There, pronouns are the most frequent dislocated dependents. Pronoun heads also appear, as in presentational structures built around ça or ce.

Topic-prominent languages such as Chinese and Japanese pose a harder question. Their sentence-initial topics are frequent, and they are not always tied to a resumptive element. Treebanks of such languages differ in whether they treat these topics as dislocated, as an argument label, or through a local subtype. The guidelines leave room for this through subtyping, but they call for consistency within each treebank (Nivre et al. 2020).

In treebanks and research

For dependency parsing, dislocated is a low-frequency label. Errors on it barely move overall attachment scores, yet they matter wherever topic structure matters, as in discourse analysis or coreference resolution. The dislocated noun and its resumptive pronoun corefer, and the tree records both.

Rare labels of this kind also draw the attention of studies on annotation consistency. Such work inspects UD corpora for words that receive conflicting analyses in similar contexts (Marneffe et al. 2017). The boundary with topicalized obj and with vocative is a typical source of such conflicts.

The enhanced representation keeps the basic tree and adds edges for implicit relations (Schuster & Manning 2016; Marneffe et al. 2021). It does not change the label itself, so the link between the dislocated phrase and its resumptive pronoun remains a matter for coreference.

For multilingual treebanks and cross-lingual parsing, the main value of the label is uniformity. A topic announced at the clause edge receives the same analysis in every language that marks it (Marneffe et al. 2021).

Key papers

The works this page cites, the most cited first; citations as counted by OpenAlex plus the papers of this library that cite the work, read 2026-10-24.

Related concepts

• Universal Dependencies — Universal Dependencies is a framework and an open collection of treebanks that annotates the grammar of many languages with one shared…
• Dependency parsing — Dependency parsing is the task of recovering a sentence's syntactic structure as directed, labelled links between its words. Each word is…

More papers

Topics: 🌐 Universal Dependencies · 🌳 Dependency parsing

Shelves: 🗣️ Language and Linguistics

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