Why Norwegian Right-Dislocated Phrases are not Afterthoughts

A right-dislocated phrase in Norwegian is either a full lexical phrase of the canonical sort, which is richer in semantic content than its coreferential intraclausal partner, or it is a pronoun which adds no semantic content that was not already present in the coreferential intraclausal phrase. A frequently occurring subcategory of right dislocation in Norwegian involves a lexical phrase in situ and a coreferential dislocated pronoun. While an afterthought analysis of pronominal right-dislocated items may easily be dismissed offhand, an afterthought account of the canonical type of Norwegian right dislocation may seem initially plausible. However, on the basis of prosodic, syntactic and pragmatic criteria it is argued that there is no viable afterthought analysis of any subtype of right dislocation in Norwegian.