Pronoun immediately following its antecedent

Question

Is placing a pronoun immediately after its antecedent in a sentence valid grammar?

Is there a term for this construction?

Some examples are:

President Obama, he gave a speech last night.
The speech, it was about the financial system.

I hear this on the Planet Money podcast at least once per episode.

Barrie England · Accepted Answer

Huddleston and Pullum (authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’) call it ‘dislocation’, of which they distinguish two types, ‘left dislocation’, where the Noun Phrase is postioned to the left of the clause nucleus, and ‘right dislocation’, which describes the opposite. As an example of left dislocation, they give ‘One of my cousins, she has triplets.’ This construction seems to match exactly the OP’s examples.

Huddleston and Pullum further comment, ‘Dislocated constructions can be easier to understand than their basic counterpart.’

D Krueger · Answer

This is topic fronting followed by a resumptive pronoun.

The pronoun does not always immediately follow its antecedent:

President Obama, we heard him give a speech last night.

Whether it is valid grammar or not is an open question. It is not unusual to hear this type of construction in verbal communication. But it isn't often seen in writing. Then again, even when written, it's perfectly understandable.

Jinx · Answer

When I was learning "proper" English grammar in the '50s, '60s and '70s, this so-called rhetorical device was taught to be a grammatical error, with the explanation that the pronoun was redundant.

Wendy Beaver · Answer

This is a pronominal appositive. Mark Twain uses them often in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For example:

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it (335).

There's an excellent article by Bruce Southard and Al Mulleron on Twain's idiosyncratic use of grammar, called “Blame it on Twain: Reading American dialects in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

Pronoun immediately following its antecedent

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