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
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
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")
Some more examples of dislocated sentences:
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.