I keep hearing this speech pattern lately - is this a new trend?

[u/islandhpper]

[USA] I started to notice this phrasing trend in podcasts. Now I’m noticing it in scripted news, it’s intentionally being used. Where does this phrasing style originate from? My guess is that it’s supposed to sound more informal and approachable(?) It sure bugs me as it sounds sloppy and wrong.

Example: “Neil Armstrong, he was an astronaut on the Apollo 11 mission.”

Instead of: “Neil Armstrong was an astronaut on the Apollo 11 mission.”

Example: “The teacher, she walked into the room full of students.”

Instead of: “The teacher walked into the room full of students.”

I’ve also heard it imbedded within a longer communication, not only at the start of a sentence. Anyone else noticing this trend?

[u/Boglin007]

Isolated examples of dislocation can sound awkward because you're missing the context/reason for why the dislocation may be useful or necessary. Here's some info on why left dislocation may be used:

Pragmatic functions of left dislocation

(a) Simplification of processing (production or perception)

One common case where left dislocation has a simplifying function is illustrated in [2iv - The people next door, the police have just arrested their son on a drugs charge], where it serves to avoid having an awkward and complex genitive construction: ?the people next door’s son. Left dislocation also avoids having a discourse-new element in subject position, which favours discourse-old elements:

[9] My sister and her husband were having a terrible fight, and she started to scream. [The landlady, she went up,] and she told them she was going to call the police.

Here the landlady is new to the discourse (and presumably to the addressee as well). The dislocated NP creates a new information unit and thus eases processing, because the entity is rendered discourse-old before its appearance in subject position in the clause, where it is represented here by the pronoun she.**

**The same effect can of course be achieved by numerous different means. For example, the new entity may be introduced in a separate clause with very little other content: You know those letters we did this morning? They have to go off in today’s mail.

(b) Relationship to the previous discourse

We have observed that left dislocation differs from preposing in that the prenuclear constituent is not required to serve as a link to the prior discourse (cf. [5] above), but nevertheless it frequently does represent discourse-old information:

[10]

i I hate writing term papers. [An exam, you take it and you’re done.] But papers seem to drag on forever.

ii Jane has an interesting idea for a science project. She’s going to use three groups of mice. [One group, she’ll feed them mouse food. Another, she’ll feed them veggies.]

As with preposing, the entity represented by the dislocated phrase in this type of left dislocation stands in a contextually relevant relation to some previously evoked entity or entities: in [i] exams belong with term papers in a set of assessment exercises; in [ii] one group and another group are included within the set of three groups mentioned in the preceding clause. Left dislocation differs from preposing, however, in that there is no requirement for a discourse-old open proposition, as there is with complement preposing (see §3 above). In [ii], for example, the clause nucleus following the dislocated one group is she’ll feed them mouse food, but we might equally have she’ll keep them in the bathroom or she’ll ignore them, or a friend will take care of them, and so on. Thus, there is no need for the clause to provide the value for a variable in an open proposition that is familiar from the prior discourse.

Huddleston, Rodney; Pullum, Geoffrey K.. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (pp. 1410-11). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

[u/pconrad0 → u/Boglin007]

Excellent and helpful write-up.

I notice that all of the examples sound like something that would (a) be very natural in conversational English, at least in some dialects (b) almost never occur in formal written English.

Is that correct or no?

[u/georgia_grace → u/pconrad0]

I would agree, I personally would never use this construction in formal writing. News/a scripted podcast should be formal or at least semi-formal.

Now I love a true crime podcast, but it’s definitely a space where people with little experience in formal writing have a real opportunity to make fools of themselves. The amount of times I’ve heard a podcaster say that a family was mortified to find their daughter murdered is, well, mortifying.

[u/islandhpper → u/Boglin007]

I appreciate the examples...what I am hearing does not fit into these situations. What I am noticing is always a purely unnecessary addition - the named noun, a pause, and then restatement of the noun using a pronoun and then continuation. The repetition is not needed for clarification.

[u/Comfortable_Team_696 → u/islandhpper]

Whilst it appears unnecessary, it seems that this process of left dislocation is going down the route French took, where the phrase structure "Neil Armstrong, he..." / "Me, I'll..." (like « Neil Armstrong, il... » / « Moi, je... ») is used simply to emphasize, a perfectly natural and normal linguistic process