| Summary: | Among the non canonical utterances of English, two show in initial position a constituent whose referent is a participant in the event. These two structures are preposing and left dislocation. Some generative studies have concluded that their generation was largely similar. Yet they do not abide by the same constraints in discourse and do not share the same roles in the information structure. For example, a dislocated constituent may only be a topic at clause level, while a preposed element can have either topic or focus status; moreover, the use of a preposing structure is much more constrained by the leftward context, and yet preposing is more common in English than left dislocation. The study seeks to compare the two structures in order to determine their roles and to find out to what extent a non canonical initial location for a dislocated or a preposed constituent influences those roles. It concludes that being in initial position does play a role, but that a more significant factor is the syntactic relation of the dislocated or of the preposed constituent to the nucleus.
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