"… and its launch it got."
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There are several different types of "fronting" or "preposing" in English, sometimes categorized in syntactic terms (e.g. wh-movement) and sometimes in pragmatic terms (e.g. topicalization). Here's recent example of a familiar type, for which I don't know a standard name:
The stage was set for Tesla to get its launch, and its launch it got.
That example seems a bit awkward to me, but definitely still possible. Examples where the preposed item is a simpler noun phrase seem to go down a bit easier — for example, substituting "a launch" for "its launch".
The preposed item can be a a verb phrase:
He threatened to leave the meeting, and leave the meeting he did.
She said he'd be writing a letter, and writing a letter he was.
Or an adjective:
I expected them to be angry, and angry they were.
The adverbial version of so is often used in a similar way, often with the background assumed, or expressed across a conversational turn boundary:
So it seems.
So they said.
So we will.
However, scanning various grammars and articles turns up examples but no terminology. Can anyone point us to a standard term? It would be surprising if none exists.
John from Cincinnati said,
June 23, 2025 @ 10:35 am
What about chiasmus: a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form.
Chris Button said,
June 23, 2025 @ 11:03 am
I'm unclear why "topicalization" doesn't suffice.
Yuval said,
June 23, 2025 @ 12:22 pm
Lest we forget the Big Lebowski sing-songy gem, "… and proud we are of all of them."
Roscoe said,
June 23, 2025 @ 1:42 pm
H.H. “Saki” Munro:
“The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.”
Barbara Phillips Long said,
June 23, 2025 @ 2:03 pm
I think of the examples given as forms of reiteration, which I distinguish from repetition — repetition being the same thing said or written over and over. Reiteration, to me, allows for variation that repetition does not.
Jerry Packard said,
June 23, 2025 @ 2:12 pm
I think that Chris is right that topicalization describes what is going on, but Mark’s query is to see if that particular form of topicalization has a name, and I don’t know of one.
They all fit under the rubric of ‘left dislocation’, which is when information is moved leftward from its normal position for emphasis. So in the example
‘He threatened to leave the meeting, and leave the meeting he did’
the second clause, ostensibly ‘he did leave the meeting’ (SVO) becomes ‘leave the meeting he did’ (VOS), with the VO moved leftward for emphasis.
The example
A: John likes bananas
B: So it seems.
is the same, in that ostensibly in ‘it seems John likes bananas’ (it seems SVO) the ‘so’ is a coreferential anaphor for the SVO, which is moved leftward for emphasis.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 23, 2025 @ 3:56 pm
Should be called "recapitulative topicalization" or "tail-head topicalization" or sth but I can't see that such terms have been used…
Re: this adverbial so, IDK — "so they said" pragmatically means "well that's what they saaidd" and above "so it seems" can't equal "it seems John like bananas" (which would be most unGrice) but rather means about "indeed that is the impression I get as well"…
Jerry Packard said,
June 23, 2025 @ 4:36 pm
Jonathan, you are confounding the sentence-initial pragmatic particle ‘so’ (like, ‘so, how’s it going’) with anaphoric ‘so’. In the leftward dislocation version, the underlying clause is ‘it seems so’, and the anaphoric ‘so’ is left dislocated to clause-initial position.
Joe said,
June 23, 2025 @ 4:51 pm
Yodation.
Jerry Packard said,
June 23, 2025 @ 5:03 pm
Correct, you are.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 23, 2025 @ 8:27 pm
We're talking about the same so — what I mean is that contemporary English "anaphoric" so is actually not purely "anaphoric" 'like that' but rather means 'indeed like that', 'at any rate like that', 'simply like that', etc., unless it is Dated or Idiomatic.
Incidentally, Chinese languages really do have ubiquitous "anaphoric" "adverbs" (= 'like this/that') – hard for English-speaking learners precisely because there is no straightforward English equivalent. E.g., Mandarin —
Tāmen shì nàme shuō de
Good English: "That’s what they said" // Bad: "They said so", "They so said"?!. (To moderns, "They said so" means "They simply said as much", "They insisted as much")
Taiwanese (movie I was just watching) —
Wife: [You just married me for my phat ass!] Husband: Chò-sit-lâng lóng mā kéng án-ne!
Good English: "Comeon, farmers all choose like that / that way." Bad: "Comeon, farmers all so choose."?! (dubious … archaic?)
Etc.
Tom Recht said,
June 24, 2025 @ 2:07 am
Pragmatically this seems to be the same phenomenon as the "VP preposing" discussed by Greg Ward in this 1990 paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/414728
As Mark's examples show it extends beyond VPs, but maybe a citation search for that paper would find a broader term.
~flow said,
June 24, 2025 @ 7:02 pm
Speaking like Yoda he was rumored to do, and speaking like Yoda he did!
(Joe beat me to it)
jaap said,
June 25, 2025 @ 4:45 am
The last "so" example seems different. While "So it seems" and "So they said" are inversions of "It seems so" and "They said so", the last example does not work the same way. "So we will" surely cannot be an inversion of *"We will so". To me it does not feel like there is an elided "do" and certainly not a use of transitive "will", and I can only interpret is as meaning "Therefore we will".
Jerry Packard said,
June 25, 2025 @ 5:54 am
@jaap
So it would seem.
David Marjanović said,
July 12, 2025 @ 2:07 pm
Not quite; there are two verbs there, one finite, one infinite. "He did leave the meeting" is SV(f)V(i)O, "leave the meeting he did" is V(i)OSV(f); V(i)O is indeed moved earlier for emphasis, but the basic SV word order is not violated.
Indeed shared with Yodaspeak this is; after all Comment-Topic-Verb order Yodaspeak has.