Learn English – “We went swimming later in the afternoon, Jack and I.”

grammarlinguisticsnounsphrasesword-order

Why does the following phrase sound old fashioned?

We went swimming later in the afternoon, Jack and I.

I am trying to describe what is happening here by breaking the sentence down into its basic components, but I am having difficulty doing this. The "Jack and I" part is the Noun Phrase, right? Is there a certain language formality to placing this at the end of the sentence behind the comma? Am I crazy in thinking that the above format sounds more formal than "Jack and I went swimming later in the afternoon"?

I'm adding some more information that has come up through the conversation below:

I pulled the line from a young adult book written in 1942. I'm studying the text and trying to identify elements that make it 'feel old.' One of these elements is a general presentation of phrases in a more formal way (as compared to other modern YA publications.)

Best Answer

We went swimming later in the afternoon, Jack and I

This sentence has been done something to.
It's an example of the syntactic rule of Right-Dislocation.
The sentence it's transformed from is

  • Jack and I went swimming later in the afternoon.

The rule copies an emphasized Noun Phrase (which may be subject, object, or oblique) in a sentence, and repeats it, with a different intonation, for emphasis, at the end of the sentence. It's not a movement rule, but a copying rule, since the original NP remains in place as a pronoun.

There's also a rule of Left-Dislocation, which copies the NP to the beginning of the sentence.

Here's the entry from Haj Ross's list of The Top 200+ English Transformations
  (p.4, categorized under "I. Emphasis; A. Pseudoclefts and Dislocations")

"6. LEFT AND RIGHT DISLOCATION:

  • My horse snores. ➞ My horse, he snores. (via LEFT DISLOCATION), or

  • My horse snores. ➞ He snores, my horse. (via RIGHT DISLOCATION)

In pseudoclefts, this rule will produce related sentences like the following:
Anne's brother left ➞ Anne's brother is the one who left ➞ Anne's brother, he's the one who left."

Some more examples of dislocated sentences:

  • My Uncle Will hates the Dodgers a lot. (Base sentence)
  • My Uncle Will, he hates the Dodgers a lot. (Left-Dislocation of Subject NP)
  • The Dodgers, my Uncle Will hates them a lot. (" of Object NP)
  • He hates the Dodgers a lot, my Uncle Will. (Right-Dislocation of Subject NP)
  • My Uncle Will hates them a lot, the Dodgers. (" of Object NP)

As for why anyone would think any of these are more or less "formal" or "old-fashioned" than others, I can't really say. "Formal" and "old-fashioned" are not linguistic terms, anymore than "fad" or "fancy". Everybody has their own idea(s) about these terms.

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